Latest WAIS Divide Stories

National Science Foundation Drilling-related breakthroughs funded by NSF expected to advance "frontier science" in a variety of disciplines Three very large-scale, National Science Foundation-funded Antarctic science projects--investigating scientifically significant subjects as varied as life in extreme ecosystems, the fate of one of the world's largest ice sheets and the nature of abrupt global climate-change events--have recently each reached important technological milestones that...

Application deadline is Nov. 28, 2011; deployments to take place Jan. 13-20, 2012 The National Science Foundation (NSF), manager of the U.S. Antarctic Program is accepting written requests from professional journalists to report on scientific research supported by NSF's Office of Polar Programs (OPP). Selected journalists will deploy to Antarctica for approximately one working week. NSF annually selects a small group of journalists, representing a range of news organizations, to make...

Research project completes drilling for the year, reaching two miles below West Antarctic Ice SheetOn Friday, Jan. 28 in Antarctica, a research team investigating the last 100,000 years of Earth's climate history reached an important milestone completing the main ice core to a depth of 3,331 meters (10,928 feet) at West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide (WAIS). The project will be completed over the next two years with some additional coring and borehole logging to obtain additional information and...

DURHAM, N.H. - After enduring months on the coldest, driest, and windiest continent on Earth, researchers today closed out the inaugural season on an unprecedented, multi-year effort to retrieve the most detailed record of greenhouse gases in Earth's atmosphere over the last 100,000 years.Working as part of the National Science Foundation's West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide (WAIS Divide) Ice Core Project, a team of scientists, engineers, technicians, and students from multiple U.S. institutions...