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The research team will continue to explore remote regions of the seafloor around McMurdo Station, Antarctica with a recently developed remotely operated vehicle (ROV) for underwater research.

Ask questions or post comments for Ms. Prevenas here.

A small team of earth scientists and engineers will be using a specialized drill to reach buried ice deposits in the Dry Valleys region of Antarctica. Stagnant and/or slow moving debris-covered glaciers may contain ice several million years in age. By comparison, the oldest ice yet cored from the East Antarctic Ice Sheet is approximately 1 million years old. As a result, these buried ice deposits hold an ancient archive of Earth’s past atmospheric conditions. Each ice core will enable the research team to gain access to a reliable record of atmospheric and climatic change extending back for many millions of years, making it by far the oldest ice yet known on this planet.

The carbon cycle is the means by which carbon is moved between the world’s soils, oceans, atmosphere, and living organisms. Northern tundra ecosystems play a key role in the carbon cycle because the cold, moist, and frozen soils trap rotting organic material in the soils. This very slowly decaying organic material has caused carbon to build up in the Arctic during the past thousands of years. Now warming in the Arctic is slowly causing the tundra to become warmer and dryer. As a result, the trapped carbon leaves the soil as carbon dioxide and goes into the atmosphere.

A diverse team of researchers will participate in the first of three research cruises this season in support of the Bering Sea Ecosystem Study (BEST) and the Bering Sea Integrated Ecosystem Research Program (BSIERP).

The expedition members will visit several research sites in Greenland as part of an initiative to foster enhanced international scientific cooperation between the countries. The expedition members will spend several days learning about the research conducted in Greenland, the logistics involved in supporting the research, and gain first-hand experience conducting experiments and developing inquiry-based educational activities. This year's work builds on the 2007, 2008, and 2009 expeditions and is supported by the National Science Foundation. The project was developed through cooperation with the U.S.-Denmark-Greenland Joint Committee, which was established in 2004 to broaden and deepen cooperation among the United States, the Kingdom of Denmark, and Greenland.

The expedition members will visit several research sites in Greenland as part of an initiative to foster enhanced international scientific cooperation between the countries. The expedition members will spend several days learning about the research conducted in Greenland, the logistics involved in supporting the research, and gain first-hand experience conducting experiments and developing inquiry-based educational activities.

The research team of undergraduate geoscience students participating in the Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Program, will travel to Svalbard to conduct independent research projects. Research focuses on how climate influences the modern glacial, river and lake systems in order to better interpret the sediment record of past climate change.

Using a large hollow drill, the WAIS Divide Ice Core Drilling team aims to collect a 3,500-meter-long ice core, or sample of ice, from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Because of the weight of the overlying snowpack, snow that falls and accumulates on ice sheets re-crystallizes and forms annual layers over time. The ice core recovered during the project will have annual resolution, or distinct yearly markings, for the past 40,000 years! In ice sheets, the compression of snow traps small bubbles of air in the layers of ice. By measuring concentrations of greenhouse gasses and non-greenhouse gasses and their isotopes trapped within bubbles in the ice, the team aims to develop climate records dating back to 100,000 years before present. This ice core will provide the first Southern Hemisphere climate and greenhouse gas records of comparable time, resolution, and duration to ice cores previously recovered in Greenland. The ice core will enable scientists to make detailed comparisons of greenhouse gas concentrations and environmental conditions between the Northern and Southern hemispheres with a greater level of detail than previously possible. The biology of the ice collected will also be investigated.

A large international team of scientists and drilling technicians will be working throughout the austral summer to continue to assemble and test the world’s largest scientific instrument, the in-ice IceCube Neutrino Detector that is about 75% complete.

This project is an international, interdisciplinary effort to address the rapid environmental changes occurring in the Antarctic Peninsula region as a consequence of the abrupt collapse of the Larsen B Ice Shelf in the fall of 2002. As a result of this collapse, a profound transformation in ecosystem structure and function has been seen in the coastal waters of the western Weddell Sea. This transformation appears to be redistributing the flow of energy between organisms, and to be causing a rapid change in the ecosystem beneath the ice shelf. For instance, the previously dark waters of the Larsen B embayment now support a thriving phototrophic community, with production rates and phytoplankton composition similar to other productive areas of the Weddell Sea.

Underlying the northern arctic coast of Alaska is a thick layer of permafrost. As water melts and pools on top of the permafrost, thaw lakes are formed. Much of the North Slope of Alaska is covered in such thaw lakes. As they decompose organic material, the bacteria and other microorganisms living in thaw lakes produce either carbon dioxide or methane, depending on the conditions. Methane is a highly potent greenhouse gas with a global warming potential 22 times that of carbon dioxide, and increased microbial activity in thawing permafrost areas could lead to changes in the atmosphere due to the increased release of methane.

The research team will be sampling the coastal waters of the Arctic Ocean to investigate how microbial creatures affect the productivity of a coastal Arctic ecosystem. They will travel to the field site via snowmobile and sample the seawater through a hole drilled in the sea ice. The seawater collected will be used to look at competition between autotrophs, organisms that make their own food, and heterotrophs, organisms that cannot make their own food, for nitrogen (N) in the waters near Barrow, Alaska.

The field work will take place over the course of three seasons (two years) to give researchers the opportunity to investigate the coastal water ecosystems in different seasons, winter and summer and with different amounts of daylight. The sources of nitrogen vary when there is no daylight in the winter from the summer where there is nearly 24 hours of daylight.

In ocean ecosystems, microbes dominate many of the processes and the major producers and consumers of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases. Understanding the role of microbial communities in the Arctic ecosystem is and essential part of predicting the impact of climate change on Arctic food webs and other natural cycles.

Learn more at the project website.

Team researchers will be investigating air-surface chemical interactions in the Arctic, and how these will evolve in future climates. Their efforts are part of the Ocean, Atmosphere, Sea Ice, Snowpack (OASIS) program—an international program that involves scientists from the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, and the UK.

Post questions and comments for members of the 2006 Oden Expedition Team.

The Polaris Project is an innovative international collaboration among students, teachers, and scientists. Funded by the National Science Foundation since 2008, the Polaris Project trains future leaders in arctic research and informs the public about the Arctic and global climate change. During the annual month-long field expedition to the Siberian Arctic, undergraduate students conduct cutting-edge investigations that advance scientific understanding of the changing Arctic.

A diverse research team aboard the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter (USCGC) Healy will conduct sampling along a series of transects over the eastern Bering Sea. Research on the ship is multidisciplinary, with scientists using a variety of techniques to document ocean conditions and the productivity of the Bering Sea ecosystem.

Antarctica plays a central role in global tectonic evolution. Competing theories have been put forward to explain the formation of the Transantarctic Mountains (TAMs) and the Wilkes Subglacial Basin (WSB), primarily due to a lack of information on the crustal thickness and seismic velocity of the areas. The research team attempts to resolve how the TAMs and WSB originated and how their formation relates to Antarctica’s geologic history. Since most of Antarctica is covered by large ice sheets, direct geologic observations cannot be made; therefore, “remote sensing” methods like seismology must be used to determine details about the earth structure.