17. March 2008 08:28
Ten Questions with Descartes Prize laureate Dr. Eric Wolff (British Antarctic Survey), member of the EPICA Team
Dr. Eric Wolff
1. What does winning the Descartes Prize mean to you and EPICA (European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica)?
Winning the Descartes Prize is a great recognition of the work of the EPICA team. It shows that the science that has come out of it is interesting and important for climate research and eventually for knowing how to tackle climate change. And for me personally, having been part of EPICA for a long time, it feels like it has all been worthwhile.
2. How did you get involved into the EPICA project and what was your role?
There is a long history of European collaboration in ice coring and I have been an ice core scientist for more than 20 years. 1989 was the first year when eight European countries got together to drill in Greenland in another ESF programme called GRIP (Greenland Ice Core Project), and building on that we said ‘lets do the same thing in Antarctica’, starting around 1995. I was the chief scientist in the field two field seasons, and then I became the chair of the science committee
3. What is your scientific background and how did you get into this research field?
I am a chemist by training with an undergraduate and a PhD in chemistry. When I left university, I had the opportunity to go to the Antarctic, doing work on interesting environmental topics and still using my science. Actually, when I started, climate change wasn’t a major topic at all, but is has turned out that it’s one of the subjects that are really important to society, so it’s great to be able to carry on.
4. What were the most important and most astonishing results you obtained in the EPICA project?
Knowing that the Earth goes in and out of ice ages about every 100000 years, we wanted to find out what happened within those cycles in the Antarctic by analyzing ice cores. We claimed that we would go back 500000 years and we actually got 800000 years of ice core records! One of the key findings from EPICA is that there is no time in the last 800000 years where the carbon dioxide or methane concentrations were nearly as high as this century, proving the impact of man-made emissions. The carbon dioxide, which you measure in the air bubbles of the ice, tracked the air temperature in the Antarctic astonishingly faithfully, telling us a lot about the interaction between the climate and carbon dioxide in a natural system. Another unexpected result was that an Antarctic counterpart could be found for every single one of the rapid climate shifts around the North Atlantic during the last 100000 years. This coupling is resulting from changes in the North Atlantic heat transport, commonly known as the Gulf Stream.
5. The field work of EPICA was conducted in Antarctica, one of the world’s most extreme environments. Which were the biggest challenges the project faced?
It’s challenging not because it’s cold and windy and snow covered, but because the ice core drilling sites are located a long way from the coast in very remote parts of Central Antarctica, which means they are also far away from the stations that routinely supply everything for a campsite requiring the drilling equipment, power and food supplies. Keeping up the momentum to carry on drilling is also a challenge, especially when in the case of the Dome C, the drill got stuck and then we actually had to start again. But as we had already got so far and we found it was successful to work together, we were all motivated to continue.
6. What does the field work in Antarctica look like?
I was the leader in the field in two field seasons at Dome C, one of the two drilling sites. At the time, it was a summer-only station. At the beginning of each summer, around 40 people would go to Dome C, of which 20 were from the ice core project and the others logistic people who were helping to keep us alive. Basically you get up and have to persuade yourself to get out into the open snowscape. The warmest it ever got when I was at Dome C was -18 °C. The scientists, wearing thick padded outfits, work long hours in the laboratory, which is kept as close as possible to -20 °C. The drill brings up an ice core of about three meters in length at a time, and the scientists have to process that core, making various physical measurements and then cutting it up into sections, which were partly analysed on-site, partly sent back in boxes to laboratories in Europe. Of course, you go to a nice comfortable building in between, warm up with a cup of coffee or lunch, and with EPICA being a European programme you get the best of each country, such as a French chef and Italian wine.
7. How does ice core drilling contribute to the understanding of our current climate change and the prediction of our future climate?
Measurements in the atmosphere were only starting routinely about 50 years ago, and most of the knowledge on past climates comes from ice cores. EPICA has contributed to understanding what the climate system is capable of – such as changing rapidly - which helps us to improve the models predicting the future. We also see the carbon dioxide concentration changing with the climate, telling us about how the oceans are capable of taking up carbon. That is highly relevant, as we want to know what happens to the carbon we emitted into the atmosphere in the last 200 years - how much of it is still going to be there in a hundred years’ time, and how much of it is taken up by vegetation, how much of it is taken up by the oceans. By knowing what has happened in the past, you can work that out.
8. EPICA was one of the longest running Research Networking Programmes of the European Science Foundation (ESF). What was the added value of conducting collaborative, pan-European Research?
EPICA wouldn’t have happened without it being pan-European and as we wanted to do something exciting, we did it the European way. No individual country in Europe could have provided the logistics, the material, the drilling expertise and enough scientists to do the measurements. We worked out that there are something like 80 different measurements made on the EPICA ice cores, and no lab has the instruments to do all those measurements. If you take for instance the slow and difficult gas analyses that are used to make the carbon dioxide measurements, the results wouldn’t be ready now, if we had not had three labs that could do them and compared the results.
9. As an expert in your field, do you think the perception of climate change and research has changed?
The perception has definitely changed in the last year or two. However, the often shallow understanding is worrying. To tackle this issue, EPICA has contributed a lot to crucial science communication and education, being a project which has a beautiful and exciting research location and which can easily visualize and explain its findings to the public, currently also within the scope of the International Polar Year.
10. How do you see the future in collaborative ice core drilling and how do you think ESF could be involved?
There is an informal grouping of all major countries involved in ice coring called IPICS (International Partnerships in Ice Core Sciences), which has set up an agenda of important research ahead, and of which I am the co-chair. One of the goals is to get an even older ice core, another one is to go back to the last interglacial in Greenland, the last time where the Earth was similarly warm as now. Furthermore, we have agreed within in Europe that we like the way we worked and we want to continue working together. So we formed a subgroup called EUROPICS (European Partnerships in Ice Core Sciences), which the European Polar Board of ESF is supporting. EUROPICS is planning smaller projects, but we will probably have a big project like EPICA, for which we will need again a formal coordinating authority like the ESF.
For further information on Dr. Eric Wolff, please click here
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