Welcome to WAIS Divide Outreach!
The West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide (WAIS Divide) Outreach Program (WDOP) is an educational site dedicated to improving the understanding of ice coring and how it pertains to the study of climate change. Our site is made available to anyone who has an interest in learning how scientists go about unraveling the climate history of the Earth, however, our focus is mainly on K-12 teachers and students.
WDOP will be placing science education specialists in the field along with the researchers and technicians who are responsible for running the ice coring operation. Through the use of podcasts, blogs, audio/photo/video galleries we will bring you the latest information available directly from the field at the west Antarctic ice sheet. The WDOP project is designed to coincide with the International Polar Year (IPY) and will be sending back reports from the field in 2007, 2008, and 2009.
WAIS Divide is a United States deep ice coring project in West Antarctica funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and is the second component to the larger WAISCORES initiative. The purpose of the WAIS Divide project is to collect a deep ice core from the flow divide in central West Antarctica in order to develop a unique series of interrelated climate, ice dynamics, and biologic records focused on understanding interactions among global earth systems.
The WAIS Divide ice core will provide Antarctic records of environmental change with the highest possible time resolution for the last ~100,000 years and will be the Southern Hemisphere equivalent of the Greenland GISP2, GRIP, and North GRIP ice cores. The most significant and unique characteristic of the WAIS Divide project will be the development of climate records with an absolute, annual-layer-counted chronology for the most recent ~40,000 years. In addition, due to the high snowfall rate, the WAIS Divide record will have only a small offset between the ages of the ice and the air trapped in the ice. The combination of high-time resolution and this small age offset will allow us to study interactions between climate variations and atmospheric composition with a level of detail previously not possible in deep long Antarctic ice core records. As such, the WAIS Divide ice core will enable detailed comparison of environmental conditions between the northern and southern hemispheres, and the study of greenhouse gas concentrations in the paleo-atmosphere, with a greater level of detail than previously possible.
So, join us now as we provide you with a window on life at a research field station in the frozen wilderness that is Antarctica!
Latest posting on March 11, 2008
new educational resources
Check out the Clean Air-Cool Planet Climate Change Backpack
The premier climate change resource for informal educators!
latest from the field
The size of the Antarctic Ice Sheet is striking. Join CBS News correspondent John Blackstone where the ice is two miles thick, and it stretches over an area larger than the United States and Mexico combined.
WDOP teacher workshop
Join us this summer (2008) at our WAIS Divide Outreach Program free teacher workshop taking place in Glacier National Park, Montana.