Hobart hosts international ice core scientists

The International Partnerships in Ice Core Sciences (IPICS) Second Open Science Conference has begun, bringing more than 200 scientists and drilling experts from 22 countries to Tasmania for a week of scientific presentations and discussions.

According to the conference chair, Dr Tas van Ommen, the role of the forum is to enable cooperation between nations in order to overcome the logistical and technical challenges of drilling ice cores. One of the major priorities for the conference is progress towards finding and drilling the world’s oldest ice.

“Ice cores are an immensely valuable archive of information about how the Earth’s climate has changed in response to drivers such as greenhouse gases, volcanic eruptions and solar activity,” Dr van Ommen said.

“The oldest ice core retrieved from Antarctica to date is about 800,000 years old, which falls just short of a major shift in global ice age cycles that occurred about a million years ago.

“We think that million-year-old ice exists deep within the Antarctic ice cap, and if we can recover it then we can start to piece together exactly what caused this fundamental change in climate cycles.”

But how will scientists reach this hypothetical million-year-old ice? As noted by Dr van Ommen, “Antarctic ice cores can be well over three kilometres deep and hundreds of kilometres away from any permanent base, which tends to make ice core drilling costly and time-consuming.”

But he said there is optimism about the potential for emerging technologies to improve the efficiency of ice core drilling projects, with conference discussions surrounding “new rapid-access drilling technology, which can penetrate several kilometres of ice in just days or weeks”.

“A rapid-access drill has been deployed in Antarctica by the United States this summer, and we are looking forward to hearing about the first results,” he said.

The conference will also see the presentation of the first scientific results from the Australian-led Aurora Basin Project, conducted 550 km inland of Casey research station in 2013–14. Dr van Ommen described this project as “part of broader international efforts to improve our understanding of how the climate has varied naturally over the past 2000 years in the lead-up to the current era”.

“The Aurora Basin Project is providing new results for a large sector of Antarctica where no data was previously available,” he said.

The conference is being held at the C3 Convention Centre in South Hobart and running from 7–11 March.