Not your average compilation of #knowledge!
6 Unusual #Libraries That Aren’t Home to Books https://www.mentalfloss.com/literature/libraries/unusual-libraries-not-home-books
#sourdough - my sister loves this one!
#Puppets #icecores #more!
Not your average compilation of #knowledge!
6 Unusual #Libraries That Aren’t Home to Books https://www.mentalfloss.com/literature/libraries/unusual-libraries-not-home-books
#sourdough - my sister loves this one!
#Puppets #icecores #more!
Meeting LISA
LISA: the Lightweight In Situ Analysis box is one of a kind; built by our friends at PICE in the Niels Bohr Institute. Later this year we’re taking LISA to Antarctica for the first time ever, to analyse shallow snow and firn cores directly in the field.
This is part of our contribution to the EPIC iQ2300 – a project led by Prof. Arjen Stroeven in Stockholm and organised by the Swedish Polar Research Secretariat.
iQ2300 is a huge project, and we are just a small part of it: the aim is to understand Dronning Maud Land’s evolution from the Holocene and out to 2300. Expect to hear a lot more about this effort in coming months…
Map of Antarctica, I lifted from polar.se : LISA will be visiting the Swedish Wasa station in DML – the top bit on this map – with usNow back to our humble friend.
We hope LISA will help us understand how much snow falls in Dronning Maud Land, how much it varies from year to year and what is the influence of sea ice and far field atmospheric processes on the rate of snowfall. Snowfall is exceptionally difficult to measure and one of our biggest uncertainties in working out Antarctic mass budget and the response of Antarctica to a changing climate (spoiler alert: we might have a paper coming out about this shortly)…
Meet LISA: a view inside the Magic Box..Although LISA has been used in Greenland before, this is quite an experimental deployment, which means potentially really a lot of valuable scientific results. We would ultimately liek to build an Antarctic specific box, but that will have to wait to see if the results of this deployment are as good as we hope. (And some funding – if you are a billionaire with a spare couple of hundred thousand Euros, we’re always interested in talking).
The box itself is conceptually simple but in practice a little complex with a multiplicity of tubes, connectors and spare parts. This means it’s easy to fix if it breaks down, but also we need to understand how it works first.
Some parts of LISA are quite fiddly…Today, the awesome and exceptionally generous Associate Professor Helle Kjær took myself, Stockholm Uni Prof Ninis Rosqvist and our PhD colleague from the Novo Nordisk funded PRECISE project, Clément Cherblanc through the use of the box.
Helle showing Clément the workings inside LISAThere’s a lot to remember and a lot to check but we’re reasonably hopeful we’ll get good results. The aim is to understand both the interannual variability on decadal timescales and the spatial gradients in snowfall accumulation. It’s a huge task, so it’s probably fortunate that we have 6 weeks or so (depending on the weather always!) to try and get it deployed at anumber of different sites which will hopefully allow us to do this.
It’s a big change to my normal fieldwork activities, but also a logical extension of them. And highly complementary to the climate and SMB modelling we are developing.
Nonetheless, ithere’s a lot of new stuff and I have in the past weeks learnt a great deal about transporting very small amounts of mildly hazardous chemicals on airlines, how to deal with customs and pack fragile instruments in large boxes.
Much more to come on this project, so stay tuned…
Clement getting stuck into using the software that measures different properties in the cores.#PolarSekretariatet #AntarcticFieldwork #IceClimate #PolarClimate #Snow #SMB #AtmosphericVariability #iceCores #FirnCores #SnowCores
#Antarctica #AntarcticFieldwork #AtmosphericVariability #climateChange #firn #FirnCores #IceClimate #iceCores #iQ2300 #PolarClimate #PolarSekretariatet #smb #snow #SnowCores
In Antarctica, two giant rifts, known as Chasm 1 and Halloween Crack, split across the Brunt Ice Shelf. The implications of the cracks are huge as ice shelves hold back huge volumes of landlocked water, regulating its entry into the oceans surrounding Antarctica. But as global warming increases, so too does the likelihood of cracks, …
12,000-Year-Old Ice Core From Mont Blanc Rewrites Europe’s Climate Story…
Glaciers act as natural archives, storing layers of #ice that contain valuable clues about Earth’s environmental history. Within this frozen landscape, scientists find tiny traces of dust, pollen, and pollution. These particles serve as time-stamped markers, helping researchers study how the planet’s #atmosphere and #ecosystems have changed over thousands of years... #icecores #climate…
"An international team of scientists announced [in January] they’ve successfully drilled one of the oldest #IceCores yet, penetrating nearly 2 miles (2.8 kilometers) to #Antarctic bedrock to reach ice they say is at least 1.2 million years old."
An international team of scientists announced Thursday they’ve successfully drilled one of the oldest ice cores yet, penetrating nearly 2 miles (2.8 kilometers) to Antarctic bedrock to reach ice they say is at least 1.2 million years old.
ANSTO scientists, Dr. Andrew Smith, Dr. Quan Hua and Dr. Bin Yang have contributed to a paper that elucidates how in situ cosmogenic radiocarbon (14C) is produced, retained and lost in the top layer of compacting snow (the "firn layer") and the shallow ice below at an ice accumulation site in Greenland.
ANSTO scientists, Dr. Andrew Smith, Dr. Quan Hua and Dr. Bin Yang have contributed to a paper that elucidates how in situ cosmogenic radiocarbon (14C) is produced, retained and lost in the top layer of compacting snow (the "firn layer") and the shallow ice below at an ice accumulation site in Greenland.