Team sets up camp on Arctic sea ice

Three scientists—two with close ties to the University—are living in a frigid ice camp this spring as part of a $1.4 million National Science Foundation project they have dubbed SEDNA, for Sea-ice Experiment: Dynamic Nature of the Arctic.

SEDNA also is the name of an Inuit goddess of the Arctic, and the acronym was selected to reflect the International Polar Year’s focus on the stewardship of the polar regions and to recognize the strong representation of women in the project.

The SEDNA team includes Cathleen Geiger, associate research professor in the Department of Geography with the Center for Climatic Research; Jacqueline Richter-Menge, EG ’79, ’81M, a research civil engineer with the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers’ Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory; and Jennifer Hutchings of the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks

“The Arctic sea ice cover, which is undergoing a lot of stress, plays an important role in the climate,” Richter-Menge says. “As temperatures rise, there is less sea ice, and the less sea ice, the higher the temperature because there is a reduction in the white ice surface that bounces the sun’s rays back into space.” She says the project will study the mass balance of the ice cover, taking into account the area covered and the thickness of the ice “as it drifts around the Arctic.”

As the scientists endure frigid temperatures of around minus-30 degrees Fahrenheit at the ice camp, other researchers will be stationed at Prudhoe Bay and Fairbanks in Alaska to conduct satellite imaging and computer modeling that includes remote sensing work by scientists in UD’s Video Image Modeling and Synthesis (VIMS) Laboratory. (See page 34.)

Using helicopters, snowmobiles and human-powered sleds, researchers on the ground will “deploy instrumentation on buoys and send information to the mainland via satellite,” Richter-Menge says. “And, we will continue to get information until the instrument sinks or is eaten by a polar bear, which is not unheard of.”

By combining work on the ice with that at VIMS and the University of Alaska, the team hopes to develop a long-term way to monitor what is going on in the Arctic. “The success of this project is an enormous amount of team effort,” Geiger says.

She calls the Arctic “one of the few places on Earth where you feel like you are standing on a planet.” From an aircraft, she says, “You can actually see the Earth’s curvature and get a sense of the Earth as a globe. It’s as close to being in outer space as one can get and still be standing on Earth.”

UD’s Center for Climatic Research, established in 1978, conducts research on hydroclimatology, or the role of water in climatology, including such frozen water as glaciers, atmospheric ice, permafrost, snow and sea ice.

“There are only a few tens of scientists in the world who engage in this type of field-oriented sea ice research, and most of them are close to retirement,” Geiger says.

She predicts that the next generation of field polar scientists “will see changes on this Earth that my generation never even dreamed about when we were just starting out. We always assumed that the ice would always be there, as it has been for hundreds of thousands of years. This new generation will grow up under the new paradigm of sea ice—and its big brother, the glaciers—as a geophysical phenomenon on the endangered species list.”

—Neil Thomas, AS ’76