With the help of a $17.4 million grant from the National Science Foundation, Thayer School of Engineering professor Mary Albert will lead the U.S. Ice Drilling Program for four years to gather data about climate change in Antarctica and Greenland.
The NSF gave the grant by means of its Office of Polar Programs.
Ice proxy drilling gathers data about previous environmental conditions that reveal up to thousands of years of evidence of climate change through. Albert, in conjunction with her colleagues, has worked with the University of Wisconsin’s Ice Drilling Design and Operations group to produce drills that are used in Antarctica and Greenland. “We just finished drilling a mile-long sight in Antarctica,” Albert said. “We also have a lot of smaller programs using smaller drills where scientists go out for maybe one season and drill maybe 200 meters to look at recent environmental change.”
She was named the first executive director of the U.S. Ice Drilling Program Office when it was founded in 2010 by the NSF.
She also said that going to central Greenland or Antarctica to look at ice sheets could produce hundreds of thousands of years of evidence, depending on how far the drilling goes. Ice coring can identify evidence from up to 130,000 years in Greenland and 800,000 years in Antarctica.
Since there is no central institution for ice coring in the United States, unlike in other countries such as Germany and Japan, Albert said she is responsible for overseeing all of the work around ice drilling today.
“I work with scientists across the nation and to find out where we think the science is coming in the next 10 years,” she said. “What are the important drivers? What do we need to identify? What drills do we need for that science?”
Albert said that not all of the money will go to the College and that several partaking institutions, such as the University of Wisconsin and the University of New Hampshire, will receive a portion of the grant money.
The University of Wisconsin receives the money for the design and production of drills because of its IDDO program.
“Having this grant will ensure that scientists and engineers will be doing what they need to to get the product, and to do the drilling in Antarctica and Greenland,” she said.
She also said that it is a crucial time to be studying the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica because of recent climate change and a surge of concern in the general public about global warming.
Earth sciences professor Bob Hawley has worked with Albert since 1997, even before he came to teach at the College.
He said that most of the people with whom he works are contractors for the University of Wisconsin’s IDDO program who spend seasons working abroad with the drills on various ice coring projects.
Hawley said that such a large grant speaks volumes on the integrity of Dartmouth as an institution.
“It really signals investment and confidence in Mary Albert and in Dartmouth, which is really reassuring,” he said.
Outreach and education program manager at the NSF Peter West said gases found in some ice cores can reveal the composition of the atmosphere thousands of years ago.
He also said that though the grant in question is exponentially larger than the average grant the NSF gives, the large amount of funding reflects the large expense of the ice coring projects.
Around 12,000 out of 55,000 applicants receive grants from the NSA on average per year for a 22 percent funding rate, according to West. The average grant size for one year is $160,500.
