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| 2001 Team |
David Schneider
Field Assistant
University of Washington
Seattle, WA
Since my first trip to Antarctica with the 2000-01 US-ITASE field team, I've moved to Seattle, Washington and have spent a lot of time completing my master's thesis for the University of Pennsylvania. In Seattle, now that I have my M.S. degree, I am continuing related types of research at the University of Washington, where I will someday get a Ph.D. in the Earth and Space Sciences program. I have a B.A. with a major in geology from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, the land of cows, colleges, and contentment. My master's thesis is all about Antarctic climate variability, but focuses on only the last 21 years, since that is the time period for which we have extensive spatial coverage of important measures of climate variability, such as surface temperatures. The data analyzed in my thesis largely comes from satellites.
With ITASE, we are after a different indicator of climate variability, the record found in ice cores. My project, working with professors Eric Steig (University of Washington), Jim White (University of Colorado), and Chris Shuman (University of Maryland), will analyze the stable isotopes of oxygen and hydrogen found in the 200-year records of the US-ITASE ice cores. We will also look in more detail at short-term isotopic, stratigraphic, and density profiles from snow pits and shallow cores studied at each of the places the traverse visits. All of these snow pit and ice core records will be compared to the satellite records. The few dominant systems of climate variability that are indicated in the satellite records should also be found in the ice core records, and we will reconstruct their changes through time.
One of the best parts about going to Antarctica is escaping the ordinary to see a whole different world, so I'm excited about joining the ITASE traverse for half of this year's field season and seeing another wide open stretch of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. I enjoy hiking, biking, kayaking, and other outdoor stuff, as well as exploring all that Seattle has to offer (music, arts, food, etc.). I've even had a few cups of mocha and latte, but I am trying to avoid the coffee addiction.
