The goal of the team 's research is to develop a past climate and precipitation record of Central Alaska over the past 1000 years. In order to accomplish this task, the team will be extracting and analyzing a series of three ice cores from an ice divide between the North and South Peaks of Mount Hunter within Denali National Park and Preserve. They will also be continuing ice depth and surface velocity surveying of major glaciers within Denali National Park and have plans for using this information to develop improved ice volume estimates and historical glaciological reconstructions of Central Alaska.Research at this site is important as it completes the development of a spatial ice core array (a range of data) in the North Pacific that has been underway for the past decade, including climate records from the St. Elias Mountains, Coast Range, Brooks Range, and Wrangell Mountains. Mt. Hunter in central Alaska lies in a different precipitation and climate regime from these regions, and thus represents the missing piece in this array needed to evaluate spatial precipitation and atmospheric circulation changes on various timescales in this region of the Arctic. Considering the apparent teleconnections (climate phenomena related to each other and occurring large distances from one another) between the Arctic and Antarctic climate and meteorology, completing this array of ice cores may also provide information that is particularly useful for world glaciological and climate modeling purposes. More information about the project can be found at the University of Maine website. |