Deepest ice core ever found in Canada collected by researchers

Researchers from the University of Manitoba are getting a glimpse 10,000 years into the past with a newly drilled ice core.

Researchers at the University of Manitoba have successfully drilled and retrieved a 613-metre-deep ice core at Axel Heibergs Island in Nunavut.

This is the deepest one ever pulled in Canada. Ice cores are samples that can provide information about the past.

“By analyzing this ice core, we should get a 10,000-year record of climatic conditions over the Canadian Arctic,” says researcher David Babb. “This is the first time we’ve been able to do something like this.”

This dig, known as the Muller Ice Core Project, uses innovative techniques to measure the ice and is bringing new drilling technology to Canada.

Babb says thanks to the ice core originating in the far Canadian North, scientists will be able to learn a lot about sea ice in the Arctic.

“We’ll be performing an analysis on this ice core that will also give us a roughly 10,000-year record of sort of the variability on high ice conditions and low ice conditions,” he says. “With this one ice core, we will actually get quite a bit of science out of it.”

‘Dreamed of finding for a long time’

Dorthe Dahl-Jensen has waited her whole career to collect a sample like this one. She’s the leader on this project and says she’s eager to learn more about the long history of ice coverage.

“I‘m hoping to learn when the sea ice was gone in previous warm periods,” she says. “But I am also hoping to learn more about how old the ice cap is, how old the ice is at the bottom.”

Dahl-Jensen says there are still many unanswered questions.

“Do we have remains of the ice cap that covered North America during the glacial period? Or is it a newer ice cap that started to got grow in our present warm inter-glacial (period)?” she says.

“It becomes more exciting the older the ice is at the bottom because we get a longer history and the coverage of ice in North America,” she says.

The team of researchers also found rocks in the ice, which Dahl-Jensen says can reveal a lot.

“This helps us determine how long the ice has been covered in this area because by looking at the rocks, and the luminants of the rocks, we can see how long they have been isolated from the sun,” she says. “That’s really exciting and more than I had hoped for.”

Earlier this year, Dahl-Jensen was also part of a team in Antarctica that successfully drilled a 2,800-metre-long ice core.

This discovery uncovered the oldest samples of Earth’s climate, which sits at more than 1.2 million years old.

“All in all, it’s been super successful,” she says. “We’ve made an ambitious plan and until now, it’s been going according to schedule.”

The project has been years in the making. Meetings began back in 2018, but plans were halted during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Project includes researchers from Canada, Denmark, Australia

The ice cores will be stored at the Canadian Ice Core Laboratory at the University of Alberta in Edmonton.

Researchers there will examine three 70-metre ice cores.

Additionally, researchers from the University of British Columbia will look at greenhouse gases and mercury, by pumping air out of the snow.

Babb believes there will be years of research from this extraction.

“It’s not just a one off, quickly analyze and move on. There’s a lot of research that’s going to come from this ice core,” he says.

“I think it’s a really exciting time, both at the University of Manitoba where we will be doing this analysis, but also for Canada more generally.”

Researchers say the knowledge gained from this project will provide more accurate projections for climate change for communities in Northern Canada.