Freezing Temperatures and Antarctic Expeditions: A Climate Story Book
Image Credit: Zander Sunberg
Bruce Vaughn and Tyler Jones are two climate scientists who conduct research through CU Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR). Their work is centered around observing the process of the Earth warming through ice core technology in the glacial zones of Antarctica and Greenland.
Tyler Jones is the author of various scientific articles about different topics concerning the environment. He writes about topics ranging from arctic community analysis to historical records of different scientific processes that occur (or have occurred) in the Arctic throughout the history of the Earth, as well as other topics.
Both Vaughn and Jones have traveled to remote areas in Greenland and Antarctica to study the ice that exists in glaciers, with hopes of obtaining knowledge about the Earth’s climate from hundreds of thousands of years ago.
“With this study we were looking for a smoking gun about climate change…everything pointed to humans…but climate modeling is full of non-linear feedback that makes it difficult to say for sure,” said Tyler Jones in an interview at INSTAAR.
The work being done through INSTAAR at CU Boulder allows scientists around the globe to better understand how humans have negatively impacted the environment and warmed the surface of the Earth dramatically over the last ~200 years.
Ice cores are drilled from glaciers and contain small amounts of gasses and other particles. The data that comes from the glaciers allows scientists, like Vaughn and Jones, to rewind time by thousands of years and to take a closer look at what the climate on Earth was like before humans were roaming and polluting freely.
According to Vaughn, because of human impacts, the ice cores and their contents have changed dramatically over time. Additional particulate matter was found inside the ice dating back to the time of the Industrial Revolution and the discovery of mining for oil and fossil fuels.
This is a direct result of the human impact on the environment, as our waste and pollution has traveled to uninhabited areas of Greenland and Antarctica in approximately the last hundred years.
“We are taking our atmosphere to places it hasn’t been for a million years,” said Bruce Vaughn in an interview.
Humans would be unable to discern what the climate was like a million years ago without the revolutionary impact that ice cores have had on the scientific community of climatologists like Bruce Vaughn and Tyler Jones.
"At the most fundamental level...if we don't understand the past we cannot expect to predict the future," said Jones.
Hopefully in the future ice core technology can be further utilized to help better the understanding of human's impact(s) on the environment.
Works Cited (Sources):
https://icecores.org/about-ice-cores
Vaughn, Bruce. CU Boulder, INSTAAR.
Jones, Tyler. CU Boulder, INSTAAR.
Image Credit: Zander Sunberg
