The expedition team climbs to Camp 1 on Mt. She and her team successfully ascended the mountain and drilled a record-breaking 327-metre-deep high-altitude ice core in the hope of finding Pleistocene ice that can shed light on the history of climate change in the North Pacific over tens of thousands of years. Most recently, Criscitiello led a month-long expedition to Mount Logan, Canada’s highest peak at 5,959 metres in the southwestern corner of the Yukon. Criscitiello’s team is creating a searchable database to allow other researchers to access the wealth of information at the U of A lab. The oldest sample currently in the archive dates to roughly 79,000 BC, during the last ice age.Ĭareful identification and examination of the ice can offer insight into changes in our climate, pollution and even ancient civilizations. The lab houses about 1.4 kilometres of cylindrical ice cores drilled from various sites, mostly from the High Arctic in the far northeast corner of Canada near Greenland. “Those can tell us a lot about the past.” “As an ice core scientist, I look at different ions like sodium and chloride, as well as other species like isotopes of oxygen,” she says. Then there are even smaller things that Criscitiello studies. “The most obvious is volcanic ash, but there’s also stuff like pollen and atmospheric dust.” ![]() “There’s lots of tiny stuff in ice,” says glaciologist Alison Criscitiello, director of the Canadian Ice Core Lab. ![]() But we’re not talking about T-bone steaks and ice cream - or, for that matter, a woolly mammoth or anything big enough to see with the naked eye. Old ice interests scientists for the same reason we put food in freezers: when things freeze, they don’t break down.
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