DYE2 dates back to the mid 50s, a relic of the cold war. Home to one of the Distance Early Warning (DEW) line radar stations it housed military teams monitoring the skies with radar for Russian bombers in the 1950s. The site transitioned to a science station and in the 1970s a series of short 50-100 meter ice cores were drilled. Each core holds ice bubbles, small time capsules frozen in place, holding a record of the Earth’s past atmosphere, or as we know it, climate. Data from the DYE2 cores allows us to map past climate to Arctic glacier extent.
GRIP (Greenland Ice Core Project) takes us back in time over 100,000 years. The GRIP ice core was drilled in Central Greenland two decades ago. Located at 12,000 feet in elevation by the Summit Camp the core measures over 3000 meters long. Stretched down to Greenland’s bedrock, this core provides us with the longest record of Greenland’s climate history.
Operation Ice Bridge is a current mission collecting a wide range of information on the changes occurring in ice in the polar-regions. The spring project is focused on measuring the rate of change in Arctic ice – both land and sea ice. This information will rely on measurements over a period of years, and draws on past studies and data collections. Several of the Ice Bridge partners have been collecting Arctic ice data for a number of years. Between the IceSat satellite that collected ice surface elevation from 2003-2009, and an annual ATM (Airborne Topographic Mapper) survey that operated over three decades, large reaches of the ice sheet have been measured establishing a history of precise ice surface elevations for a baseline comparison.