Millennia-old ice core will be studied at University of Alberta

Researchers are hoping ice samples from the arctic will help them learn more about climate change. CTV News Edmonton's Evan Kenny has the story.

Researchers in Alberta will have the chance to study the ancient world through an ice core that will be brought from the arctic.

A team led by the University of Manitoba is researching the prehistoric climate of the high arctic on Axel Heiberg Island in northern Nunavut at the Müller Ice Cap.

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The team plans to drill an ice cap core around 600 metres long, the depth of the bedrock below the island, and 10 centimetres thick, cut the core up and send it to a variety of labs in Canada and Europe for research and measurements.

The hope is that the ice core contains a record of climate and sea ice in northern Canada over the past 4,000-20,000 years. Work suggests that the Müller Ice Cap has survived throughout the Holocene period, which began 11,700 years ago at the end of the last major ice age.

“Our observations are really limited to the last 200 years and ice cores provide a really nice long-term record that shows climate variability,” said David Babb, a research associate at the University of Manitoba.

This ice core will be the deepest one ever drilled in Canada and is unique, according to Babb.

The snow that accumulates on the ice cap will be different depending on what the open water and sea ice conditions were at the time the snow fell, potentially showing changes in the environment over the last 20,000 years.

“This information is important context for understanding modern changes to the Arctic; sea ice extent is changing rapidly, and glaciers are rapidly retreating, but how these changes compare to those in the past is not fully known,” the University of Manitoba wrote about the project.

The Canadian Ice Core Laboratory, at the University of Alberta, is one of the labs that will study the core and will also keep a continuous record of the ice from the project, which will make further measurements possible when new methods are developed in the future.

The team on the ice cap actually has a working freezer to keep the ice samples frozen, as the -15 C temperature isn’t cold enough.

Half of the ice core is set to be flown off the ice cap in May and the other half in June before the top of the ice cap starts to melt.

In addition to the main, large ice core, the team is drilling a number of 80-metre cores for study.

Part of what researchers hope to learn is how humans have affected the environment so far north over the lifetime of the ice cap.

“We’d like to look at the transport of various environmental contaminants to the far north,” said Alison Criscitiello, the director of the Canadian Ice Core Laboratory.

“There’s all sorts of implications when we do those kinds of contaminant reconstructions, both for people and ecosystems in the north that are impacted by things that folks do very far away from here.”

Other questions researchers hope to answer include:

• how sensitive are the arctic ice caps to changes in sea ice and climatic conditions;
• what is the relationship between sea ice change and climate change;
• how did sea ice conditions change in the Arctic Ocean during the past millennia?

Initial research and analysis on the ice core is expected to happen over the course of a year or two.

With files from CTV News Edmonton’s Nahreman Issa and Evan Kenny