Text-Only Version
Voice of Bruce Williamson, UMaine Grad Student, Earth Science:
"This is the drill site for the Victora Upper Glacier Dry Valleys 2005 season."
Karl Kreutz, Assistant Professor, UMaine Climate Change Institute:
"Travelling to Antarctica is a great experience. It hasn't gotten old yet after six times. There's always some new adventure that happens down there every time we go."
Bruce Williamson:
"We go down to Antarctica because it's a relatively pure, pristine environment where we can get background information about what the planet is doing with a minimum amount of interference from human causes. So, you can get sort of a baseline pulse of what the planet is doing."
Karl Kreutz:
"We're really interested in how the climate system operates in Antarctica, how it's changed recently, how it's changed in the past and what that means for the climate system today. Ultimately, we'd like to understand what's going to happen to the climate in the future and so Antarctica plays a key role in that. 98-99% of the continent is covered by an ice sheet and because there's this ice sheet, it makes it a great place to recover ice cores. These ice cores are cylinders of ice that we extract from the ice sheet. They can be anywhere from tens of feet in length to a couple of miles long. What we've learned from our work in Antarctica over the last decade or so is that the climate system in Antarctica can change quite rapidly over a short time scale. It's these natural fluctuations that we need to understand in order to put what's happened in the last century into a bigger context."
Bruce Williamson:
"My belief is we can only tell if humans are truly influencing our climate if we go to a point where what we're seeing in the record is beyond anything that we've seen in the past--a lot of people would say that we've seen that. Still, within the community, it's not totally solid yet."
Karl Kreutz:
"Often what it comes down to is a kind of detective story--using a bunch of different pieces of evidence to reconstruct what's happened in the past."
Bruce Williamson:
"Antarctica is cold and when it's cold, you're very happy to find your tent at night. But you walk out of your tent each day and it doesn't matter if it's cold. The area where we were working is so beautiful that you were very happy to be cold. It was an experience like no other."
Karl Kreutz:
"I consider myself incredibly lucky to have this job. I'm able to come in here every day and investigate problems that are of interest to me. On top of that, there's all the adventures that go on during these trips to Antarctica, the Himalayas, the Arctic. Personally, for me, I can't imagine doing anything else."
