National Institute of Polar Research

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Collaborative Research

Studies of climatic and environmental variations by bipolar ice-core analyses

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

Uncovering the mechanisms of climatic and environmental changes

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.

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