A frozen history of climate change

EGRIP (East Greenland Ice core Project) is an international science camp sited on the Greenland ice sheet and situated on the 76°N parallel north. The camp is located± 2,700 m above sea level and is the onset of the longest ice stream in Greenland (NEGIS – North-East Greenland ice stream.

EGRIP is unique in being a first time at drilling an ice core through an ice stream with an aim to retrieve a deep ice core in North-East Greenland.Currently, the Greenland Ice Sheet is shrinking by 270 gigatons per year and transports ice from inland to the ocean. Ice streams are responsible for a significant amount of the mass loss from the Greenland Ice Sheet and their properties and behaviour are currently poorly understood. Knowledge of how ice sheets react to past and present climate changes will help at estimating ice streams’ contribution to future sea level changes.The ice is a layer upon layer of annual snow fall which never melts away, and as the layers gradually compress the snow becomes ice. This gives thousands of annual ice layers that, like tree rings, can tell us about variations in past climate from year to year. The ice core holds unique archives and recordings of past atmospheric conditions; including historic temperature evolution, volcanic eruptions, greenhouse gas concentrations and many other parameters that determine the environmental conditions. The new knowledge about warm climate conditions in the past, will aid our understanding of the evolving global warming concerns for the future.

Text: Anna Filipova