Survivor’s

Photos by Doug Clark
Science by moonlight
Geology Associate Professor Doug Clark’s quarry is buried in hundreds
of feet of ice, wedged between two high, jagged peaks in B.C.
Clark, co-researcher Eric Steig of University of Washington and other
colleagues have twice spent weeks on a remote glacier near the top
of Mount Waddington, the highest peak in B.C.’s Coast Range, using a
4-inch core drill to extract blue cylinders of ice.
“The ice in that glacier is like a time capsule,” Clark says. “It records climate
change and weather events precisely, year by year and, in some
cases, event by event. On the West Coast, we’ve only got about
100 years of instrument-supplied weather data. The information
locked in that ice field could multiply our known data by an order
of magnitude.”
The most recent trip yielded about 460 feet of ice – only about 50
years’ worth, Clark says. But it revealed such incredible details about
climate and air quality that Clark and his colleagues are determined
to return, with a better drill, to get at the deeper, compacted layers
hundreds of feet down, where they believe the ice is centuries old.
Funded with the help of the National Science Foundation and the
Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Science, the
work will not only help us understand the history of climate in the
Pacific Northwest, but the future as well. Learning about how our
region’s climate has responded to past events, such as El Niño, may
help us predict future effects of climate change.
Visit www.wwu.edu/window to see footage of an avalanche near
the researchers’ camp.
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