Reconstruction of the past climate and environment from Antarctic and Arctic ice cores
Principal Investigator Kumiko Goto-Azuma
Ice-core processing and analyses in Greenland
Snow deposited onto ice sheets/ice caps in Antarctica and the Arctic endures summers without melting, and accumulates over countless years. By drilling through ice sheets/ice caps, the past snow and atmosphere preserved within the ice cores can be retrieved. To reconstruct climatic and environmental changes that have happened during the past decades to hundreds of thousand years, we plan to analyze the ice cores obtained from different sites, such as Dome Fuji in Antarctica and Greenland in the Arctic. The information retrieved from the ice cores will greatly contribute to improving projections of the future climate and environment. The ice cores will be analyzed with cutting-edge analytical methods developed at the Ice Core Research Center, National Institute of Polar Research. Furthermore, we participate in an international deep ice coring project in Greenland and plan to carry out a new deep ice coring project near Dome Fuji aimed at retrieving the oldest ice core in the world.