The National Science Foundation has again selected Kendrick Taylor, Ph.D. to be chief scientist for the West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide (WAIS Divide) Ice Core Project. This major, multi-year project involves 23 scientific organizations and over a hundred scientists and technicians on a project to collect ancient ice from deep within the Antarctic icesheet. The project is widely recognized as a crucial step in defining the influence of changes in greenhouse gases on climate.

“The site was selected because it is the best place on the planet to determine how changes in greenhouse gases affected climate during the last 100,000 years. The dust, chemicals, and air trapped in the two-mile-long ice core tell us how and why climate changed in the past, and that helps determine how human activity will change climate in the future.” Taylor said.

Taylor was first selected as the chief scientist in 1996. His work in Antarctica began in the early 1980’s, with his conclusions from a study of 100,000 years of climate change recorded in a 1.8-mile deep ice core from the Greenland Ice Sheet. Taylor’s findings indicated that climate conditions could swing from glacial-those causing ice ages-to interglacial, such as we're experiencing now, in less than a decade. The findings shattered commonly held assumptions of steady, incremental changes in climate in a process requiring thousands of years.

WAIS Divide, named for the high-elevation divide along which the West Antarctic Ice Sheet ice sheet flows in opposite directions, is the best spot on the planet to recover ancient ice containing trapped air bubbles which are samples of the Earth's atmosphere from the present to as far back as 100,000 years ago. The record from WAIS Divide will allow the most detailed study yet of the interaction of previous changes in greenhouse gases and climate change. This information will improve computer models that are used to predict how the current, unprecedented high levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere caused by human activity will influence future climate.

Taylor is a geophysicist and research professor in DRI's Division of Hydrologic Sciences, and has been with the institute since 1983. A 20 minute video of the project is at http://waisdivide.unh.edu/multimedia/how-do-we-know.shtml. The project website is http://waisdivide.unh.edu.