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Ole scientists to participate in International Polar Year

By David Gonnerman '90
August 29, 2005

Jacobel
Jacobel
St. Olaf Professor of Physics Bob Jacobel and research faculty member Brian Welch have been awarded a $408,000 grant from the Office of Polar Programs at the National Science Foundation. The grant will fund the two scientists' participation in U.S. activities during the International Polar Year (IPY) in 2007.

WelchBrianLG
Welch poses with the St. Olaf radar shelter during the U.S. ITASE traverse in 2001. Jacobel and Welch developed the special radar, which penetrates ice and gives information about ice flow and history.
Jacobel and Welch will be a part of the International Trans Antarctic Scientific Expedition (ITASE) traverse, one of the main U.S. contributions to IPY. The ITASE traverse will explore regions of East Antarctica in a corridor stretching along the Trans Antarctic Mountains from the main U.S. base at McMurdo on the coast to the South Pole. "Most of this area has seen almost no ground-based scientific study and most of what we know so far is based on satellite observations," says Jacobel. (Read about the Jacobel Glacier here.)

The grant also will support the participation of St. Olaf physics students. "Our students have played essential roles in all the research we have done in Antarctica and in ice-covered regions such as recent projects in Alaska and Arctic Sweden, where students participated in the field work," says Jacobel. "Several have gone on to do graduate work that has taken them to Antarctica and areas of the Arctic."

ITASE has as its goals a study of climate and global changes recorded in the chemistry of the near-surface ice focused primarily on the past 200 years. "The ice retains an almost perfect record of everything that falls out of the atmosphere," says Jacobel. "This enables scientists to characterize air circulation patterns like El Nino, temperature, pollutants and even the composition of the atmosphere itself."

Modeled after the highly successful International Geophysical Year in 1957 that discovered the Van Allen radiation belts that surround the earth and took scientists (including Carleton's former president Larry Gould) to the polar regions, IPY will be the organizing theme for a range of polar scientific activities in both hemispheres starting in July 2006 and continuing through June 2008.

Contact David Gonnerman at 507-786-3315 or gonnermd@stolaf.edu.