Collaborative Research: How to trace glacial meltwater in the ocean using ship-portable hydrographic analysis of dissolved neon and krypton

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This award will build a new instrument to measure meltwater from glaciers in the ocean. Distinguishing glacier melt from sea ice, snow melt, and rain is a difficult but important task because melting glaciers threaten significant and acute consequences, including chronic flooding and sea level rise. The causes and impacts of melting glaciers are a challenge to observe and predict, because they unfold in complex and hard to reach places: beneath miles of ice, under floating ice shelves, and during the coldest times of the year. The objective of this instrument is to increase oceanographer's capacity to measure and map glacier melt in the ocean by 300-400%, while reducing costs and providing near real-time results. This increase in measurement capacity will permit comparison of regional and seasonal changes in the glacier melt from the ice-covered land masses of Antarctica and Greenland. The instrument will be field validated in Rhode Island coastal waters, and then it will be used to measure glacier melt near the US Palmer Station on the Antarctic Peninsula. The partnership between the University of Rhode Island and SRI international presents an important public-private partnership that will encourage the use of private-sector technology for open access research, and recruit the future workforce in environmental sensing technology by employing undergraduate ocean engineers, supporting a Masters student in the completion of their degree, and through exhibit models of glacial ice shelves and their interactions with the ocean. This award seeks to advance tracing of glacier melt in the ocean by developing a ship-portable "meltwater mass spectrometer" that measures 20Ne, 22Ne, and 184Kr dissolved in water and seawater. This advance is possible thanks to developments in gas purification, but also thanks to a new analytical capacity to measure the mass-to-charge spectrum of neon that we predict will bring new precision to the analysis. Neon is an analyte that has proven difficult to resolve in portable noble gas analyzers. It will dramatically reduce cost and expand our existing sample capacity by eliminating complicated sample storage and the lag time between sample collection in polar regions and subsequent laboratory analysis at home. We further anticipate that it will be straightforward to incorporate the MWMS technology into the SRI International underwater mass spectrometer, enabling future AUV missions to inaccessible regions, such as calving fronts and ice shelf cavities. We will test and refine the MWMS prototype by leveraging RI State funding for ship time on the R/V Endeavor and again during a full field trial in Marguerite Bay as part of the annual Palmer LTER hydrographic expedition aboard the RVIB LM Gould.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.