International Polar Day - Ice Sheets

Ever heard of International Polar Days? They are a response from the IPY organization to journalists and teachers looking for ways to talk about the International Polar Year. During IP Days, there will be press releases, access to experts and to researchers in the field, images
and videos etc.

The next IP Day will be focused on Ice Sheets, and will occur on December 13th.

Here are some interesting ice-sheet facts:

• there are only two ice sheets on the planet: one in Greenland, the other (you guessed it) in Antarctica;
• cores drilled in ice-sheets are records of past climate; the longest record comes from a core drilled at Dome C (near Concordia) by the EPICA project;
• there is a network of lakes under a large part of the Antarctic ice-sheet; the largest one is Lake Vostok; liquid water is thought to move between them relatively rapidly.
  

There's a lot more to learn about ice-sheets than is already known. For example: how do they work? How are they formed? What might the effects of global warming be? Are sub-glacial lakes really interconnected? There are over 20 different IPY projects and experiments focused on the ice-sheets. You can find a list here. Some of them, including the Norwegian-US Scientific Traverse of East Antarctica, keep blogs and web journals. As Antarctic field season is getting under way right now, these are worth reading.

Will there be an IP-Day on my kind of research? Probably not. The one that comes closest will be held on March 13th 2008, and will concern the changing Earth, ice, climate, oceans, paleo-climate and Earth history. With all the climate change angles possible on this IP-Day, I fear any mention of Solid Earth history will be pretty feeble, but I'll do my best ...


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CASE-IPY @ AGU

For those of you not in the geophysics loop, AGU stands for the American Geophysical Union, and more specifically for the Fall Meeting of said union, which is held yearly in San Francisco. It is a gigantic meeting, bringing together between 10 and 12 thousand researches in all fields of geophysics.

I usually attend every year (I have missed only one in the past 8 years), but this year getting ready for Antarctica trumped over spending a week in San Francisco. Although I shall not be physically present, there will be some emanation of me in the form of a poster about the CASE-IPY experiment, and about seismology at Concordia in general.

Following are excepts from the poster, freely re-formated for online viewing. Also available are the official AGU abstract and the poster itself.

Scientific Objectives of CASE-IPY

The East Antarctica POLENET network of which the CASE-IPY deployment is a part (station map) will provide unprece dented coverage, allowing us to:

1. Improve our knowledge of regional crustal structure. Crustal thickness measurements will help trace the boundaries of the units that make up East Antarctica, enhancing our comprehension of the formation and breakup of Gondwana.
2. Improve our knowledge of regional lithospheric structure. The network will allow lateral variations in the structure of East Antarctica to be imaged at higher resolution than previously possible using both earthquake and ambient noise.
3. Improve our sampling for inner core studies. Analysis of inner core anisotropy and heterogeneity requires seismic paths nearly parallel to the Earth's rotation axis. The deployment of stations in Antarctica will dramatically increase the number of available paths.

Concordia Permanent Station

Concordia is the site of an experimental permanent seismic observatory station, which has been operational since 2005. The extreme temperatures present at the site (-60 degrees C) imply difficult operating conditions for the seismological equipment. The quality of the data we obtain from this station has been steadily improving as we resolve the technical issues related to working at such low temperatures.



2007-2008 Summer Campaign

This year we shall deploy three prototype stations within a 10 km radius of Concordia. Each station contains a broad-band seismometer, a data recorder, a radio transmitter, solar panels, batteries, heating elements and power control electronics. Each box is protected by 16-20 cm of insulation. Data is telemetered to Concordia once a day. At sundown, when the battry charge falls below a cut-off level, the stations will shut down; they will wake up in the spring, when the solar panels have re-charged the batteries.



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CASE-IPY - Scientific Project

CASE-IPY : Concordia Antarctic Seismic Experiment for the International Polar Year

The CASE-IPY project is a part of a larger IPY initiative, the Polar Earth Observing Network (POLENET), which includes contributions from 24 countries, including France, Italy, Australia and the United States.

The aim of the POLENET consortium is to investigate polar geodynamics, the earth’s magnetic field, crust, mantle and core structure and dynamics, and systems-scale interactions of the solid earth, the cryosphere, the oceans and the atmosphere. Activities will be focused on deployment of autonomous observatories at remote sites on the continents and offshore, coordinated with measurements made at permanent station observatories.

We propose deploying 10 broad-band seismometers in East Antarctica, using Concordia / Dome C as our starting point. Our deployment will be coordinated with those of our Italian, American and Australian colleagues in order to achieve maximum coverage of the East Antarctica Plateau, and to share a maximum of logistical support.


Proposed IPY deployments in East Antarctica. Red: CASE-IPY. Dark blue: USA. Dark green: Australia. Light green: Italy (INGV). Light blue (small symbols): TAMSEIS (previously deployed by USA).

Our deployment will cover a part of East Antarctica that has as yet never been the subject of investigation, and will be a fully functional seismic antenna in its own right. It will also complete and connect the American, Australian and Italian deployments, thereby helping to create a single, large-footprint seismic array which will cover a substantial portion of the continent.

This combined POLENET East Antarctica network will number some 55 stations, and will have a combined length of over 4000 km, with a significant 2D component, providing unprecedented coverage of East Antarctica, and allowing us to reach the following objectives:

1. improve our knowledge of the regional crustal structure;
2. improve our knowledge of the regional lithospheric structure;
3. improve our sampling for inner core studies.

You can read more about the project on the IPY Expression of Intent database, which you can reach from this post: Concordia Antarctic Seismic Experiment - International Polar Year.

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IPY news : CASE-IPY is selected !!!

Our International Polar Year project has just been selected by the ANR (Agence National de la Recherche)!! In short, this means the CASE-IPY project has passed scientific scrutiny, and is deemed worth of funding. Phew....!!!!

We have been waiting a long time for this news (ever since the application deadline, which was March 1st - four months ago). My first reaction upon hearing the news this morning was elation: "We made it!". The second was: "Oh my God we are actually going to have to run this crazy experiment..." Still, even that thought is no way near enough to wipe the grin off my face.

Now for the dampener: although the project selection phase is now over, we still do not know what the funding decision itself will be. The ANR conditions funding of selected projects on the validation of each project's budget, on their financial analysis of our partners, and on the transmission of all necessary administrative and financial information by each of the partners.

In short: today's news means we should be funded, but we don't yet know by how much.



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IPY news : Global Outlook for Ice and Snow

The Global Outlook for Ice and Snow is an IPY initiative sponsored by the United Nations. It investigates the current trends in ice and snow, their links with climate change and their consequences, and has produced a peer reviewed report with contributions from over 70 scientists.

If you're interested in the current state of knowledge about ice and snow as we head into the International Polar Year, you should go visit their website. It is very well constructed and is simple to navigate and fascinating to read.

Concordia Antarctic Seismic Experiment (International Polar Year)

So what exactly are we hoping to do during the International Polar Year? The short answer is study Earth structure.

The exact details of what we will end up doing are as yet unknown, dependent as they are on funding results, logistic possibilities, and the whims of equipment and nature. However, we do know what it is we hope to achieve.

Most if not all the projects that have been proposed for the IPY are listed in an Expression of Intent (EoI) Database maintained on www.ipy.org. The following is an excerpt of the EoI for our seismic experiment project (links within the excerpts are to Wikipedia entries for technical terms). Interested readers can find the full EoI here.

Concordia Antarctic Seismic Experiment for the International Polar Year (CASE-IPY)

We propose deploying 10 broad-band seismometers in Antarctica, starting at the French-Italian scientific base at Concordia, and trending southwards. Our deployment will be coordinated with those of our Italian, American and Australian colleagues in order to achieve maximum coverage of the Antarctica Plateau and to share a maximum of logistical support. Our combined deployments will allow us to improve our knowledge of the crustal and lithospheric structure of Antarctica, as well as to provide data for core studies.

What is the International Polar Year?

The International Polar Year is a large scientific programme focused on the Arctic and the Antarctic from March 2007 to March 2009.

IPY, organized through the International Council for Science (ICSU) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), is actually the fourth polar year, following those in 1882-3, 1932-3, and 1957-8.

In order to have full and equal coverage of both the Arctic and the Antarctic, IPY 2007-8 covers two full annual cycles from March 2007 to March 2009 and will involve over 200 projects, with thousands of scientists from over 60 nations examining a wide range of physical, biological and social research topics.

It is also an unprecedented opportunity to demonstrate, follow, and get involved with, cutting edge science in real-time.

[http://www.ipy.org ]

The environmental rigors of working in the polar regions make it neigh impossible for isolated experiments to take place. One of the advantages of working at the poles during the International Polar Year is the number of other people out there at the same time, the greater amount of logistics sharing that can happen, the improved safety conditions. Another advantage is that different groups can run similar experiments in different regions at the same time. The combination of data from these different experiments can lead to results that are far greater than the sum of the results of each experiment taken individually.

Cooperation and collaboration, between scientists of different nationalities and disciplines, and between their respective Polar agencies, are key to this venture.

Starting out

All adventures start somewhere, with a single step, though it may not be easy to isolate the starting step from all the others.

This particular adventure started, for me at least, last February, when it was very naively suggested we could not let the International Polar Year go by without submitting a proposal to perform a large seismic experiment in Antarctica. From there, things started moving along with their own momentum. We wrote the project, and submitted it just before the deadline of March 1st. Then we started waiting for the verdict: funded or not funded ?

At this time, we still don't know, but like all good expeditionists, we have a backup plan. Should our large experiment not be approved, we have planned a smaller, considerably cheaper experiment which which we should be able to run with the funds we already have available.

Working in Antarctica is a logistical nightmare, as you might imagine. None of it would be possible without the logistical and financial support of specialized Polar Institutes, in particular - for us - the French Polar Institute (Institut Paul Emile Victor). The more complex the logistics, the sooner they have to be planned. We are now at the beginning of June, the Antarctic field season (which corresponds to the Antarctic summer, late October to late February) is fast approaching, and decisions have to be made.

This, for me, is where it gets real. Our experiment has suddenly jumped from being something we have planned on paper and in our heads, to something concrete. We don't yet know which of our two experiments (the large one or the small one) we'll be able to run, but we already have to buy part of the equipment, book passage on the ice-breaker that will take us to Antarctica, book space on the over-land transport that will take most of our equipment from the coast to the French/Italian base at Concordia... All this is very, very real!

The Concordia Seismic Experiment - as we have lovingly named it - has gone from residing somewhere in my brain, to being present also in my gut. It's a daunting thing, especially for me, as this will be both my first complete seismic experiment, and my visit to Antarctica.

I've set up this blog partly in order to relieve some of the tension that's building up as we prepare to make this experiment a reality, but also to share the experience with as many people as possible. I hope to convince some of my colleagues working with me on the experiment to participate in writing the blog, and I hope to entice you all to read it and send in your comments.