Conclusions

US ITASE offers the ground-based opportunities of traditional style traverse travel coupled with the modern technology of GPS, crevasse detecting radar, satellite communications and multi-disciplinary research. By operating as an over snow traverse US ITASE offers scientists the opportunity to experience the dynamic range of the Antarctic environment. US ITASE also offers an important interactive venue for research (currently eleven integrated science projects – Table 1, below) similar to that afforded by oceanographic research vessels and large polar field camps, without the cost of the former or the lack       of       mobility       of       the       latter.

Most importantly, the combination of disciplines represented by US ITASE provides a unique, multi-dimensional (x, y, z and time) view of the ice sheet and its history. In its current four year cycle, US ITASE has sampled the environment of West Antarctica over spatial scales of >5000 km, depths of >3000 m, heights in the atmosphere of >20 km, and time periods of several hundred years (sub-annual scale) to hundreds of thousands of years (millennial scale). Continued US ITASE research, future proposed US ITASE traverses (Figure 1), and collaboration with our international ITASE colleagues, will, in the next several years, provide unprecedented knowledge of past Antarctic climate and ice sheet variability and improve prediction capability.