Heading Off To Antarctica!

Paddington showing off his map of Antarctica

Hello everyone in Mrs. Macri's 3rd grade class!

My name is John and I am also a student.  I am in college at Penn State University studying what the ice in Antarctica can tell us about how and why the climate on Earth has changed over the past several 100,000 years.  It's is really cool stuff, and gives me the opportunity to work and study in a place very few people get to go to:  ANTARCTICA!

So where will I be?
Specifically, I will be working out of a small remote field camp called "WAIS Divide".  The WAIS, stands for "West Antarctic Ice Sheet", and so as you can guess, the site is located on the Western side of Antarctica.   Here is a map showing you where I'll be (The Red Dot):

What are we doing there?
A whole group of students, scientists and camp staff are heading to this camp in order to drill a deep ice core.  The ice at WAIS Divide is over 2 MILES THICK and acts as sort of like a giant tape recorder for climate.  It never gets warm enough at WAIS Divide for the snow that falls to melt.  Year after year, the snow just keeps piling up on top of itself.  As more and more snow falls, the older snow gets more and more buried.  Eventually, when the snow gets buried deep enough, the little pockets of air trapped in between the snow crystals get pinched off to form trapped bubbles.  When scientists pull out the ice cores, they can melt the snow, and analyze the air trapped in those bubbles to figure out what the climate was like when the snow fell that formed that ice.  At WAIS Divide, the 2 Miles of ice represents over 100,000 years of history and will allow scientists to see what the climate was like from then all the way up until today.  There are also scientists that are looking at small bacteria and plant remains in the ice, as well as the physical properties to try to understand how the ice in antarctica moves and flows.
My specific project involves getting small samples form the ice cores to look at the number of bubbles present at given depths.

Here is a poster that one of my fellow scientists put together:

I hope to be sending you guys updates as often as I can.  I will be flying out of New York today and will eventually end up at WAIS Divide.  For those of you that want to look up how I'll be flying, here are my destination cities:

Rochester, NY
Chicago, IL
Los Angeles, CA
Sydney, Australia
Christchurch, NZ
McMurdo Station, Antarctica
WAIS Divide, Antarctica

Here are some photos from last year!

standing in front of the food tent (galley)

getting on the plane at WAIS Divide

trying not to fall off of the bottom of the world!