Ice-snow Depository
The polar snow-ice, the important information carrier of the global climate and environmental changes, plays an important role in the research on the global changes. By systematical collection of surface snow, firn, ice shelf, glacier, and ice sheet samples and data, the conducted comprehensive researches, such as ice-snow physical geography, geochemistry, glacier remote sensing, and datum simulation, help to comprehend the process of the modern climate and environmental changes and the history of glacier dynamics changes, recover ancient climate and environmental records, get the important information on the last climate changes, probe into the mechanism of the climate changes, and provide scientific data basis to forecast the tendency of future’s climate changes for establishing social and economic sustainable strategy. Up to now all our previous CHINARE had successfully conducted expedition on glacier and gotten a lot of snow-ice samples in the King George Island of the West Antarctic, the Amery Ice Shelf of the East Antarctic, the Dalk Glacier, the Zhongshan Station-Dome A inland traverse, Dome A area, and the Yellow River Station of the Arctic.
PRIC has set up low temperature ice core depository, which stores all of the ice-snow samples and ice core samples in around 300 meters drilled from Collins Icecap of the southwestern Antarctic during the Eighth Five-Year Plan period, total 538 meters of ice core samples and approximately 2000 important snow-ice samples collected from five science traverses between Zhongshan Station and Dome A on inland icecap during the Ninth and the Tenth Five-Year Plan period, 302 meters of ice core samples collected in expedition on Amery Ice Shelf, 70 snow samples and lake water samples collected from Dalk Glacier area, four sets of snow-ice samples from the South Pole and the Antarctic Byrd Station by exchange with American Byrd Research Center.
Ice Core from Amery Ice Shelf: On Amery Ice Shelf, an ice core was collected, with the length of around 301.96 meters and a diameter of 10 centimeters, which penetrating the inland ice layer, and containing more than 20 meters of submarine ice core at the bottom. The most ice volume of the inland ice sheet is mainly transported via ice shelf to the surrounding sea, and that imposes important influence on the global ocean circulation and sea level changes. The Amery Ice Shelf, the third largest ice shelf after the Ross Ice Shelf and Weddell Ice Shelves in Antarctica, is one of the critical areas to be studied on the Antarctic Global Change, and the mass balance and the interactive process among the ice shelf and the atmosphere and the sea are the hottest issues in the polar science. CHINARE started comprehensive expedition on the Amery Ice Shelf in 2002 and has successfully got high quality ice shelf core samples.
Dome A Ice Core: We got an ice core at Dome A, with the length of around 109.68 meters and a diameter of 10 centimeters. The Antarctic Ice sheet formed around 35 million years ago. The present giant ice sheet material is accumulated from millions of years’ primitive precipitation, storing long term information of high resolution atmosphere and environmental change. In recent years, the international geosciences field pays special attention to searching for the best drilling site to find the longest climate record. Dome A, located in the center of the Antarctic Inland Ice sheet, being the zenith of the Antarctic Ice sheet (altitude 4093 meters), called “human inaccessible site”, is expected to be such a candidate. CHINARE successfully reached the Dome A in January 2005 and drilled an ice core of 109.68 meters long for the first time, which is critical for the research on the climate and environmental evolvement since the last millennium.
At present the coordination and informative expression of the ice-snow samples are ongoing in the ice-snow depository. The partial information of 100 meters of ice core samples collected from Dome A in 2005 has been published via BIRDS website. In the near future the rest information of other samples in the depository will be published in succession for the scientists and researchers to use.
