Down under up north

Battling snow and cold, UMass-led team drills deep into Arctic for climate change insights

The view of Lake El'gygytgyn from helicopter. (International Continental Scientific Drilling Program Photo)

A hardy band of scientists led by a UMass professor - undeterred by white-out blizzards or 40-below-zero cold - today sent a drill through the floor of a Siberian crater lake and deep into the earth. From there, they hope to extract an unparalleled record of climate change.

The record will be in the form of an unusually detailed sample of ancient sediment, layers upon layers of it, pulled to the surface in a hollow tube, 10 feet at a time. All told, the cylinder of sediment will be 1.5 times longer than the Empire State Building is tall. The layers will tell a rare story of an earlier era when the Arctic was warmer, and provide clues about Earth's future.

"It's a pretty good analog for where we are headed now," said Julie Brigham-Grette, a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and chief scientist for the expedition to the lake, 62 miles north of the Arctic Circle.

The scientists, from Germany and Russia as well as the United States, have spent 2 1/2 months battling the flesh-freezing Arctic elements. They departed in mid-December from a Siberian airport in a convoy of bulldozers and trucks, forging a road across the tundra for 25 days to reach Lake El'gygytgyn. They towed trailers and hauled coal-burning stoves and generators to build a camp on the lake's barren shores.

The crew worked 12-hour shifts on days with only six hours of sunlight, preparing the drill sites and assembling gear on the frozen surface of the 11-mile-wide crater lake. The wind whipped the snow into ground blizzards, creating whiteout conditions that delayed the work for several days.

To find their way from the drilling site back to camp, they rely on dozens of bamboo poles with orange flags to guide them through the disorienting white landscape. When they go to the outhouse, they carry shovels to dig themselves out of snowdrifts that, in just a few minutes, can pile high against the door.

"It's certainly one of the most extreme environments we've ever drilled in," said Dennis Nielson, president of DOSECC, a nonprofit drilling outfit that serves academic research groups and has sent five of its staff on the mission.

Brigham-Grette has been in contact with the research team remotely, using satellite phones and e-mail. On Saturday, she will fly - by plane and then helicopter - to Lake El'gygytgyn to join the drilling crew. She will be joined by one of her graduate students; another is already at the camp. Four other faculty from UMass-Amherst will work on the project remotely.

The mission will last until mid-May, when the lake's annual thaw begins and the ice will be too thin to support the more than 180,000 pounds of drilling equipment. Even now, the research crew has had to thicken the ice - flooding the surface near the drilling area with water pumped from deep in the lake so that it forms an additional layer - so it can support the weight of the drill rigs.

The core samples will be flown to the University of Cologne in Germany for analysis.

Lake El'gygytgyn, dubbed Lake E by the scientists, was formed when a giant meteor smacked into Earth 3.6 million years ago. Unlike many other lakes in northern latitudes, it was never plowed by glaciers, which scrape away layers of soil. As a result, scientists believe, it could hold the only detailed record of sediment deposits on a polar land mass that dates back millions of years.

"There really isn't anything like it, anywhere that I know of," said Steve Colman, director of the Large Lakes Observatory at the University of Minnesota at Duluth. He is a geologist but is not associated with the expedition.

Ancient sediment cores have been retrieved from the floor of polar oceans. But, Colman said, this project will fill a gap by showing what happened on the continents during climate transitions. The information is critical for predicting how vegetation and weather patterns will change as the planet warms at an unprecedented rate, he said.

Lake El'gygytgyn's sediment cores are of particular interest to scientists because the planet's polar regions are especially vulnerable to global warming. Scientists believe their temperature changes more dramatically when the Earth's climate shifts.

The soil deposits, swept by rivers and surface runoff into the lake's bottom during the annual spring melt, contain remnants of plant life such as pollen that help scientists paint a picture of a given period in the Earth's history. Like tree rings, detailed sediment cores can tell scientists about the environment during a particular time period - but they go back much further in time.

The Siberian lake's sediment cores could tell researchers how the Arctic landscape has changed over time, for instance.

"If we see more tree pollen, we know that the tree line came closer to the lake," Brigham-Grette said.

Plant fossils and pollen may also provide clues about the weather. For example, the stone pine, a tree native to Russia, thrives only in deep snow.

Brigham-Grette compares the expedition to "CSI," the popular television series about forensic scientists who reconstruct crimes.

"It's much like detective work," she said. "We're going to compare the evidence of climate change there to similar records in the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean or even Antarctica to get a much better idea of how the Earth has worked as a system."

Bina Venkataraman can be reached at bina@globe.com.