Workshop for International Partnerships in Ice Core Sciences; March 13-16, 2004; Sterling, VA

该奖项将支持一个研讨会，其目的是提供一个论坛，讨论国际冰芯倡议，并审查这种倡议如何运作。 这次研讨会将汇集国际冰芯社区的成员，讨论需要什么新的大型冰芯项目来解决主要的未回答的科学问题，启动这些项目的技术障碍，这些项目的国际合作的好处和困难，以及如何促进这些合作。 许多国际冰芯科学家对这一想法的意见都非常积极，这表明人们普遍认识到需要采取这一举措。 冰芯已经彻底改变了我们对地球系统的看法，例如，它提供了气候突变发生的第一个证据，并表明温室气体和气候在过去40万年中密切相关。 冰芯提供了高分辨率的记录，特别是气候和大气参数的良好替代物。 冰芯项目所面临的挑战是，它们需要大量的资源和专业知识（包括钻探和科学），这通常超出了任何一个国家的能力。 在项目之间保持知识的临界质量也很困难。 避免这些问题的方法之一是扩大冰芯钻探项目的国际合作，以便汇集专业知识和资源，并将其应用于最令人兴奋的新项目。本次研讨会的更广泛影响包括冰芯科学的社会相关性，以及从新冰芯获得的数据和解释将为政策制定者提供必要的信息，以便就地球如何应对气候变化做出更好的决策。此外，通过国际伙伴关系改善冰核科学，更多的学生将能够参与气候研究的一个令人兴奋和不断增长的领域。

This award will support a workshop whose aim is to provide a forum for discussion of an international ice core initiative and to examine how such an initiative might work. This workshop will bring together members of the international ice core community to discuss what new large ice core projects are needed to address leading unanswered science questions, technical obstacles to initiating these projects, benefits and difficulties of international collaboration on such projects, and how these collaborations might be facilitated. The very positive response of numerous international ice core scientists consulted about this idea shows that the need for such an initiative is widely recognized. Ice cores have already revolutionized our view of the Earth System, providing, for example, the first evidence that abrupt climate changes have occurred, and showing that greenhouse gases and climate have been tightly linked over the last 400,000 years. Ice cores provide records at high resolution, with particularly good proxies for climate and atmospheric parameters. The challenge that ice core projects present is that they require large concentrations of resources and expertise (both in drilling and in science) that are generally beyond the capacity of any one nation. Maintaining a critical mass of knowledge between projects is also difficult. One way to avoid these problems is to expand international cooperation on ice core drilling projects, so that expertise and resources can be pooled and applied to the most exciting new projects. The broader impacts of this workshop include the societal relevance of ice core science and the fact that the data and interpretations derived from new ice cores will give policymakers the information necessary to make better decisions on the how the earth is responding to climate change. In addition, by improving ice core sciences through international partnerships more students will be able to become involved in an exciting and growing area of climate research.