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New Zealand International Transantarctic Scientific Expedition (NZ ITASE) - Climate variability measured from ice cores taken along the Victoria Land Coast

Entry ID: K049_1999_2008_NZ_1

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Summary

Abstract: The climate of the Victoria Land Coast is created by the interacting influences of the Dry Valleys, East Antarctic Ice Sheet and the Ross Sea. Slight changes can significantly alter local weather patterns and as such a climate record of the area provides ideal opportunities to study rapid, high frequency climatic variations. International polar ice coring programmes (e.g. GISP and Vostok) have ... provided powerful new insights into Earth's climate back 400,000 years, from the diverse inventory of atmospheric information stored both within the ice and trapped air bubbles. To understand and predict the local response to anthropogenically induced global warming seen in these "global" ice cores, the focus of ice core research in Antarctica is moving to the acquisition of high-resolution regional paleoclimatic archives of annual-scale that overlap with and extend the instrumental records of the last 40 years back several thousand years. This has been a key motivation behind the US-led International Transantarctic Scientific Expedition (ITASE) of which New Zealand is a member.

The New Zealand project's objective is to recover a series of ice cores from glaciers along a 14-degree latitudinal transect of the climatically sensitive Victoria Land coastline and thereby directly contribute a critical dataset to ITASE. The NZ ITASE sites (including two sites at Victoria Lower Glacier, Baldwin Glacier, Wilson Piedmont Glacier, Polar Plateau, Evans Piedmont Glacier, Mt Erebus Saddle, Whitehall Glacier, Skinner Saddle and Gawn Ice Piedmont Glacier with future sites planned at Beardmore Glacier, Roosevelt Island, and coastal sites in West Antarctica) have been chosen to capture and quantify the steep climate gradients from the Scott Coast to the Polar Plateau, the local climate system of the McMurdo Dry Valleys, and the effect of altitude within the Transantarctic Mountains. Coastal sites are especially climate sensitive and show potential to archive local, rapid climate change events that are subdued or lost in the 'global' inland ice core records.

Investigation and datasets include: GPR/GPS surveying to map bedrock topography and internal glacial structure and glacier topography, firn and ice cores to quantify the variability of climate record with analysis of temperature, crystal structure, crystal geometry, density of the snow, melt, dust/tephra occurrence, gas content, porosity, gas bubble size and geometry, snow profiles were analysed for ion content, isotopic ratios, dust content, beta radioactivity, chemical properties and mineralogy to transfer functions with the meterological record, borehole temperature and light penetration, submergence velocity measurements to analyse the mass balance of the glaciers, meterological data and ablation measurements.

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Description: The IGS global system of satellite tracking stations, Data Centers, and Analysis Centers puts high-quality GPS data and data products on line in near real time to meet the objectives of a wide range of scientific and engineering applications and studies.

Geographic Coverage

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Spatial coordinates

N: -54.48

S: -54.78

E: 158.95

W: 158.77

Data Set Citation

Dataset Release Date: 2005-03-10

Temporal Coverage

Start Date: 1997-09-01

Stop Date: 1997-11-30

Location Keywords

OCEAN > SOUTHERN OCEAN

OCEAN > SOUTHERN OCEAN > MACQUARIE ISLAND

GEOGRAPHIC REGION > POLAR

Science Keywords

HUMAN DIMENSIONS > BOUNDARIES > BOUNDARY SURVEYS

ISO Topic Category

BOUNDARIES

Platform

FIELD SURVEYS

Quality The walking track data have been formatted according to the Scar Feature Catalogue which includes data quality information (refer to the link below). Data quality information for each feature can be found by using the Qinfo number of the feature in the Quality Information search.

Walking track data usually mapped to a Universal Transverse Mercator projection, Zone 57.

Access Constraints These data are available for download from the URLs given below.

Use Constraints This data set conforms to the PICCCBY Attribution License
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).

Please follow instructions listed in the citation reference provided at http://data.aad.gov.au/aadc/metadata/citation.cfm?entry_id=macca_su... when using these data.

Ancillary Keywords

GIS

GPS

Data Set Progress

COMPLETE

Originating Center

Australian Antarctic Division

Data Center

Australian Antarctic Data Centre, Australia

Data Center URL: http://data.aad.gov.au

Data Center Personnel
Name: DATA OFFICER AADC Phone: +61 3 6232 3244 Fax: +61 3 6232 3351 Email: metadata at aad.gov.au Contact Address: Australian Antarctic Division 203 Channel Highway City: Kingston Province or State: Tasmania Postal Code: 7050 Country: Australia

Distribution

Distribution Media: HTTP

Distribution Size: 129 kb

Distribution Format: shapefile

Fees: free

Personnel

HENK BROLSMA

Role: INVESTIGATOR

Role: TECHNICAL CONTACT

Phone: +61 3 6232 3528

Fax: +61 3 6232 3351

Email: mapping at aad.gov.au

Contact Address:

Australian Antarctic Division

203 Channel Highway

City: Kingston

Province or State: Tasmania

Postal Code: 7050

Country: Australia

DAVID T. SMITH

Role: DIF AUTHOR

Phone: +61 3 6232 3577

Fax: +61 3 6232 3351

Email: gis at aad.gov.au

Contact Address:

Australian Antarctic Division

203 Channel Highway

City: Kingston

Province or State: Tasmania

Postal Code: 7050

Country: Australia

Extended Metadata Properties

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Creation and Review Dates

DIF Creation Date: 2005-03-10

Last DIF Revision Date: 2012-12-20

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