This is the third of a three-part series following glacier researchers from British Columbia’s Coast Mountains to the lab as they try to unearth climate history. In Chapter 1 and the episode of The Decibel below, reporter Justine Hunter explains how the researchers collect, store and analyze ice-core samples. In Chapter 2, she explores how climate change is accelerating the erosion of glaciers.
Eric Steig has spent more than 20 years on a quest to reveal the climate history recorded in B.C.’s southern glaciers.
Standing in the University of Alberta’s Canadian Ice Core Lab this fall, with his breath condensing into clouds around him, he gently laid a cylinder of ice from an expedition at Mount Waddington onto a cradle, fired up a bandsaw and cut a thin slice along its length. This was the segment of an ice core that came from the deepest recess of the glacier – and therefore it is the most precious one.
This past summer, Dr. Steig and a team of scientists from Canada and the United States collected a series of ice cores that reached 219 metres into a B.C. glacier, hoping to chart changes in the atmosphere, as well as calamities such as major wildfires, going back 200 years or more.
It was only after he lifted the slice away, revealing a perfect, sound sample, that he could consider this long-planned project a success. “It looks much better than I expected,” he said. “So that’s cool.”
Retrieving ice cores
A team of Canadian and U.S. researchers spent three
weeks collecting ice cores under the shadow of Mount
Waddington, in B.C.’s Coast Mountains. Members of the
U.S. Drilling Program, an arm of the U.S. National Science
Foundation, set up a drill rig on a flat saddle of snow and
ice, 3,000 metres above sea level, seeking to collect an ice
core record all the way down to bedrock. The ice cores can
hold climate data spanning hundreds of years, which
would be the longest such record this far south
in North America.
Mount Waddington
Drill site
20
SNOW LAYER
40
60
FULLY-COMPACTED
ICE LAYER
80
100
120
140
Primary bore hole
160
IDP Thermal Drill System
180
200
Secondary bore hole
220
240 m
Debris
BEDROCK
Drawing is schematic and not to scale
Protective tube
Ice cores
2 m
1 m
The drilling process
1. A three-inch
electrothermal
drill bored
down through
the fully-com-
pacted ice
layer to 208
metres where
debris
obstructed
the drilling.
2. The drill was
pulled up to 180
metres where a
not-perfectly
vertical hole
was bored to
get around the
debris and reach
a final depth of
219 metres.
3. Two-metre ice
cores were brought
to the surface
where they were
sliced into one-metre
sections. They were
then placed in prot-
ective tubes and
flown by helicopter
to a freezer truck,
then transported to
the laboratory.
BRITISH COLUMBIA
Detail
Kamloops
Vancouver
Island
Vancouver
Pacific Ocean
Victoria
WASH.
100 km
Seattle
3 km
Combatant Col
Mount Waddington
BRITISH COLUMBIA
john sopinski/the globe and mail, Source:
dr. peter neff;u.s. drilling program; openstreetmap
Retrieving ice cores
A team of Canadian and U.S. researchers spent three
weeks collecting ice cores under the shadow of Mount
Waddington, in B.C.’s Coast Mountains. Members of the
U.S. Drilling Program, an arm of the U.S. National Science
Foundation, set up a drill rig on a flat saddle of snow and
ice, 3,000 metres above sea level, seeking to collect an ice
core record all the way down to bedrock. The ice cores can
hold climate data spanning hundreds of years, which
would be the longest such record this far south
in North America.
Mount Waddington
Drill site
20
SNOW LAYER
40
60
FULLY-COMPACTED
ICE LAYER
80
100
120
140
Primary bore hole
160
IDP Thermal Drill System
180
200
Secondary bore hole
220
240 m
Debris
BEDROCK
Drawing is schematic and not to scale
Protective tube
Ice cores
2 m
1 m
The drilling process
1. A three-inch
electrothermal
drill bored
down through
the fully-com-
pacted ice
layer to 208
metres where
debris
obstructed
the drilling.
2. The drill was
pulled up to 180
metres where a
not-perfectly
vertical hole
was bored to
get around the
debris and reach
a final depth of
219 metres.
3. Two-metre ice
cores were brought
to the surface
where they were
sliced into one-metre
sections. They were
then placed in prot-
ective tubes and
flown by helicopter
to a freezer truck,
then transported to
the laboratory.
BRITISH COLUMBIA
Detail
Kamloops
Vancouver
Island
Vancouver
Pacific Ocean
Victoria
WASH.
100 km
Seattle
3 km
Combatant Col
Mount Waddington
BRITISH COLUMBIA
john sopinski/the globe and mail, Source:
dr. peter neff;u.s. drilling program; openstreetmap
Retrieving ice cores
Mount
Waddington
A team of Canadian and U.S. researchers spent three weeks
collecting ice cores under the shadow of Mount Waddington,
in B.C.’s Coast Mountains. Members of the U.S. Drilling Program,
an arm of the U.S. National Science Foundation, set up a drill rig
on a flat saddle of snow and ice, 3,000 metres above sea level,
seeking to collect an ice core record all the way down to bedrock.
The ice cores can hold climate data spanning hundreds of years,
which would be the longest such record this far south
in North America.
Drill site
20
SNOW LAYER
40
Protective tube
Ice cores
60
FULLY-COMPACTED
ICE LAYER
80
100
120
2 m
140
Primary bore hole
160
1 m
IDP Thermal Drill System
180
200
Secondary bore hole
220
The drilling process
240 m
1. A three-inch
electrothermal
drill bored
down through
the fully-com-
pacted ice
layer to 208
metres where
debris
obstructed
the drilling.
2. The drill
was pulled up
to 180 metres
where a
not-perfectly
vertical hole
was bored to
get around the
debris and
reach a final
depth of 219
metres.
3. Two-metre ice
cores were brought
to the surface
where they were
sliced into one-metre
sections. They were
then placed in prot-
ective tubes and
flown by helicopter
to a freezer truck,
then transported to
the laboratory.
Debris
BEDROCK
Drawing is schematic and not to scale
3 km
BRITISH COLUMBIA
Detail
Combatant Col
Kamloops
Vancouver
Island
Vancouver
Mount Waddington
Pacific Ocean
Victoria
WASH.
BRITISH COLUMBIA
100 km
Seattle
john sopinski/the globe and mail, Source: dr. peter neff;u.s. drilling program; openstreetmap
The ice at Mount Waddington – like glaciers around the globe – is deteriorating. Dr. Steig, a professor and chair of the University of Washington’s Department of Earth and Space Sciences, and his fellow researchers are racing to collect these records before it is too late.
The director of the Ice Core Lab, Alison Criscitiello, is not part of the project, but she opened up the facility for the Waddington cores to be stored in the -40 C storage room, and sampled in the lab that is kept at -18 C.
The material gathered during her own 2022 ice core expedition, at Mount Logan near the Alaskan border, is still being analyzed at the lab. Although the Logan ice cores do not go much deeper than those from Waddington, they are expected to produce a climate record going back thousands of years. However, Dr. Steig’s new cores are special not because of their age, she explained, but because they can contain a detailed environmental history in southern B.C., where most of the province’s population lives.
Climate Innovators and Adaptors
This is one in a series of stories on climate change related to topics of biodiversity, urban adaptation, the green economy and exploration, with the support of Rolex. Read more about the Climate Innovators and Adaptors program.
The cores were collected at Combatant Col, a 3,000-metre-high saddle that sits between Mount Waddington and Mount Combatant. The col receives a tremendous amount of snowfall each year thanks to the moisture-laden air that sweeps up from the nearby Pacific Ocean.
The resulting ice layers are thick enough to show clear differences between the seasons. “It’s possible that the whole 200 years will be able to be annually dated,” Dr. Criscitiello said. “If that’s the case, this would be the southernmost annually dated ice core in North America. That’s the superlative about it.”
Counting the years
In October, dressed for the Ice Core Lab in gloves and tuques, parkas and thick boots, Dr. Steig and glaciologist Brian Menounos – a professor of earth sciences at the University of Northern B.C. and another principal investigator for this project – paused to marvel at one core that was taken from 209 metres below the surface. Most of the ice was opaque, but one small section was clear, suggesting that a significant warming event took place some time in the early 1900s. That could relate to a prolonged drought that occurred in Western Canada in the 1930s, popularly known as the Dust Bowl.
The ice cores were collected at great cost, and each piece will be mindfully harvested for information in the coming years. The thin slices that were carved away along the length of the whole 219 metres of core were cut into 1.5-centimetre-long segments. Each piece of ice was then allowed to melt in its own numbered bottle. Dr. Steig gathered the entire collection – hundreds of vials – and brought them back to his own laboratory in Washington State.
Chapter 1: Unearthing climate history frozen in time
There, he is now conducting a chemical analysis of each sample, which should allow him to track the march of the seasons at the glacier by determining the ratio of heavy to light oxygen, a measurement that is sensitive to temperature. That will in turn reveal how many years’ worth of records they have collected – and based on preliminary calculations, he said, this collection will span more than 200 years.
The full analysis will likely take a year, but the early results are promising. Starting with samples from the oldest cores, Dr. Steig has found the annual records have been consistently preserved. And he now believes that measuring the ice in 1.5-centimetre lengths may not have been refined enough. “I think it’s possible the layers are even thinner than I expected, which is exciting, because it means the core is even older,” he said in an interview from his university’s lab this November.
The researchers will return to the Ice Core Lab to collect further samples from the Waddington ice, but they won’t rush the process. “To figure out if that’s true, we’ve got to melt the core in a continuous fashion in my lab, and the core is really valuable, so we need to be careful not to do that until we’re absolutely ready with our system.”
The answers, he says, will likely emerge in 2024. “But it’s super promising.”
Dr. Steig cuts into an ice core at the Canadian Ice Core Laboratory. Within the core section, air bubbles and debris are visible. Chemical analysis of each sample is expected to reveal how many years’ worth of records they have collected.Kelsey McMillan/The Globe and Mail
Temperature swings and rainfall
Armel Castellan, a meteorologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada, said large parts of the Pacific region are a virtual data desert. Historical climate records are lacking, particularly at such inaccessible locations as Mount Waddington. And that history is important for forecasting the future.
Mr. Castellan’s job as a warning preparedness meteorologist requires charting a climate that is destabilizing: Globally, 2023 was the warmest year on record – and locally, Western Canada has been locked in an extended drought. “Now we are going into an El Nino winter,” Mr. Castellan noted, which promises to deliver warmer and drier weather into 2024. Understanding the history of drought in this region going back hundreds of years would help forecast the rate of change ahead.
When it comes to historical weather data, British Columbia’s story is largely untold, Dr. Steig agreed.
“When I initially proposed this idea almost 20 years ago, the idea was pretty simple: We have no ice core information from anywhere south of Alaska in North America, except for one small glacier in Wyoming,” he said. “So a simple thing we don’t know, for example, is how have precipitation rates changed in the last 100 years.”
Chapter 2: As B.C.’s glaciers disappear, scientists race to capture data from ice cores
There is another important trend that he hopes to unravel, which governs the feast and famine of wild Pacific salmon returns. “There’s a variation in sea surface temperatures, and therefore weather, between coastal Alaska and coastal British Columbia,” Dr. Steig said. “It tends to be wetter in one place when it’s drier in the other. It tends to be warmer in one place when it’s colder in the other.”
The pattern was first observed by those involved in fisheries and is called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, but it is not a tidy, predictable 10-year pattern. “We know that those salmon returns are related to large-scale atmospheric changes. We have good ice cores from Alaska, and having a good ice core from southern British Columbia would be the other end of that pendulum.”
The McDougall Creek wildfire burns on the mountainside in West Kelowna, B.C., in Aug. 2023.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press
The burned remains of a fire department and community hall are seen in Scotch Creek, B.C., in Sept. 2023. The 2023 B.C. wildfire season has been declared the most destructive ever recorded based on square kilometers burned.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press
Events recorded in soot and ash
The 2023 B.C. wildfire season has been declared the most destructive ever recorded based on square kilometres burned. Deeper analysis of the ice cores can offer insight into how wildfires burned in British Columbia before modern fire-suppression tactics altered natural patterns. From traces of black carbon – soot – in the layers, “we can do wildfire reconstructions, not just the frequency but also what was burning,” Dr. Criscitiello said. “Looking at the changes in wildfire frequency over time, and the changes in the vegetation that was burning over time, could tell us a whole lot, not just about temperature, but about ecosystem changes.”
The researchers are also looking for another impurity in the layers of ice from Mount Waddington: tephra, the fragments produced by volcanic eruptions.
One of the most reliable indicators to ensure the researchers have their dates correct in the ice record would be evidence of historical volcanic activity. For Mount Waddington, they are looking for tephra from 1912, which would be from the massive Novarupta eruption in southwest Alaska, which was larger than any other known eruption in North America. Ash from that event spread down the coast as far as Washington State, and its dust formed a haze that produced a cold summer throughout the Northern Hemisphere.
Depending on how far back the ice record goes, other notable eruptions may also be found in the cores.
“Let’s say we were lucky, and we go back to the early 1800s,” Dr. Menounos said. “Then we’ll very likely find the signature of Krakatoa (1883) and Tambora (1815).”
Wildfires smoke can be seen in the distance beyond the research camp on Combatant Col.Grant Callegari/Hakai Institute
Dr. Steig said fire history was not on his mind when he first proposed the project at Combatant Col. But it came to the fore as he and the rest of the team were packing up camp in mid-July, when the spectacular views they’d enjoyed disappeared in the haze of wildfire smoke. Now, uncovering the historical context of wildfires in the region tops the researchers’ agenda.
“It’s just a visceral experience, driving into Williams Lake and not being able to see the cars in front of me because the smoke was so bad,” he recalled. “We really don’t know how extreme these last few years have been in the long-term context. I would love to know really how much worse is this than the natural system over the last few hundred years.”
Those answers are tantalizingly close. A finely preserved record that likely spans the past 200 years has been exhumed and is secured in the Ice Core Lab. Now the slow, patient work to read the history set down in ice and ash and soot has just begun.
Podcast: Justine Hunter on The Decibel
Glacial ice can offer clues about the climates of eons past. But how do researchers collect, store and analyze them? On this episode of The Decibel, reporter Justine Hunter explains. Subscribe for more episodes.