Collaborative Research: SGER: Ice Core Paleoclimate Record from Mt. Waddington, British Columbia Coast Range

该奖项将使用在探索性研究（SGER）计划小额赠款赞助下提供的资金，部署实验性和移动的取芯设备，以从山顶的高山站点获取冰芯。沃丁顿在不列颠哥伦比亚省海岸山脉。该站点有希望获得过去200- 1000年净年降雪量年际变化的连续记录，但并不确定。 这很重要，因为如果钻探按计划进行，它将为气候研究人员提供一个新的古气候数据档案。 目前，大部分的冰芯古气候研究是在极地地区的大型基准站进行的。年积雪记录，即使在夏季融化层形成明显的地区也能保存完好，已被证明是大尺度大气环流模式的有用的定量指标。 北太平洋区域的积雪记录特别令人感兴趣，因为它们可能有助于记录和重建多年气候变率。 在山顶下的战斗山口，冰分界线。沃丁顿，包含约150米的冰，很少经历融化的表面。这笔资金将与加拿大气候和大气科学基金会（CFCAS）的资金相平衡，后者将承担大部分探险费用（即，直升机支助、钻井运输、钻井准备和维修），并提供卫星图像和分析，在Mt.中尺度气候模拟与冰川冰流模拟。 美国国家科学基金会和CFCAS之间的共同资助是这项SGER请求的一个有吸引力的特点，因为它有效地利用了美国的资金，为美国带来了更大的收益。除了实地测试一项可能对更广泛的科学界产生广泛影响的冰芯钻探新战略外，该项目的数据将有助于定量重建北美西部和北太平洋的气候变率，了解冰川物质平衡和水文变化。

This award will use funds made available under the auspices of the Small Grants for Exploratory Research (SGER) program to deploy an experimental and mobile coring apparatus to obtain ice cores from an alpine site atop Mt. Waddington in the British Columbia Coast Range. The site holds the promise, but not the certainty, of obtaining a continuous record of inter-annual variability in net annual snowfall over the last 200-1,000 years. This is important because if the drill works as planned, it will open up a new archive of paleoclimate data to use by climate researchers. At present, most paleoclimate research from ice cores is conducted from large base stations in polar regions. Annual snow accumulation records, which can be well preserved even in areas with significant summer melt-layer formation, have been shown to be useful quantitative indicators of large-scale atmospheric circulation patterns. Snow accumulation records from the North Pacific region are of particular interest because of their potential to contribute to the documentation and reconstruction of multi-decadal climate variability. The ice divide at Combatant Col, below the summit of Mt. Waddington, contains approximately 150 meters of ice and rarely experiences melt at the surface.The funds from this award will be leveraged against funds from the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences (CFCAS), who will bear the majority of the expedition costs (i.e., helicopter support, drill shipment, drill preparations and repair) and provide satellite imagery and analysis, installation of a weather station near Mt. Waddington, mesoscale climate modeling, and glacier ice flow modeling. The co-funding between the US NSF and the CFCAS is an attractive feature of this SGER request because it effectively leverages US funds to derive a bigger bang for the US buck.Besides field testing a new strategy in ice core drilling that could have broad impact on the wider science community, the data from project will aid in the quantitative reconstruction of climate variability in western North America and the North Pacific as well as improved understanding of glacier mass balance and hydrological variability.