Norway National Report 2007 – 2008

Prepared by: Elisabeth Isaksson
email: elli (at) npolar.no

Norwegian – US Scientific Traverse of East Antarctica

The field expedition for this international partnership involves scientific investigations along two overland traverses in East Antarctica: one going from the Norwegian Troll Station to the United States South Pole Station in 2007-2008; and a return traverse by a different route in 2008-2009 (Fig 1). This project will investigate climate change in East Antarctica, with the following goals:

• Investigate climate variability in Dronning Maud Land of East Antarctica on time scales of years to one thousand years.
• Establish spatial and temporal variability in snow accumulation over this area of Antarctica to understand its impact on sea level.
• Investigate the impact of atmospheric and oceanic variability on the chemical composition of firn and ice in the region.
• Revisit areas and sites first explored by traverses in the 1960’s, for detection of possible changes and to establish benchmark data sets for future research efforts

The first part of this 2-leg traverse has been completed. Due to technical problems the vehicles were left at 86.80033 deg S, 54.45187 deg E where the traverse will start again in November. The crew was flown into South Pole Jan 20. Altogether 700 m of ice cores were drilled, many snow samples and shallow radar profiles have been collected.
Jan Gunnar Winther from the Norwegian Polar Institute has been the expedition leader and Mary Albert from Dartmouth College and CRRELL has been the US PI and team leader.
For more information visit the website http://traverse.npolar.no

Previous reports – 2007 – prior years