May 16, 2008
San Francisco, CA
The Most Desolate Place on Earth
Venturing off into the bitter cold continent of Antarctica, a small group of glaciologists are trying to help scientists all over the world better understand the effects of climate change.
“We’re going to places where glaciers are and trying to understand how they behave; how the internal mechanics of glaciers work and also how they interact with climate,” said Dr. Slawek Tulaczyk, associate professor of Earth Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Returning from a three month study in Antarctica, Tulaczyk lead a small team to record and keep track of the water beneath glaciers there. He believes that by studying these bodies of water for the next three years, they’ll be able to form a better prediction of sea level rise. “In order to make an estimate of sea level rise, we need to be able to say how ice sheets contribute by melting or breaking off then melting into the ocean,” said Nadine Quintana Krupinski, a Ph.D. student on the team. For now, the data they recorded merely looks like a bunch of numbers on a computer screen. But these numbers will help scientists adjust their calculations to develop a better climate model of what sea level rise will look like in 100 years. “The long-term vision is, of course, to bring the knowledge of ice sheet behavior and the role of ice sheets in the climate system to a level we become comfortable enough to predict how ice sheets will interfere or interact with our activities in the future,” said Tulaczyk. Both Tulaczyk and Krupinski documented their trip via webcast on The Exploratorium’s website at www.exploratorium.edu. |
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