HR: 10:20h
AN: C21D-01 INVITED     [PDF]
TI: US International Trans Antarctic Scientific Expedition Overview
AU: * Mayewski, P A
EM: paul.mayewski@maine.edu
AF: Climate Change Institute, Universtiy of Maine 303 Bryand Global Sciences Ctr, Orono, ME 04469-5790 United States
AB: Antarctica plays a pivotal role in Earth's complex climate system. It is: encircled by the world's most biologically productive oceans, the largest reservoir of fresh water on the planet, a major site for the production of the cold deep water that drives global ocean circulation, a significant influence (through albedo effects) on Earth's energy budget, and a crucial driving component for Southern Hemisphere atmospheric circulation. Yet despite its importance, instrumented records of climate change over this vast continent are extremely sparse spatially and temporally. Fortunately, through the recovery of ice cores in combination with glacier geophysics, surface glaciology, and atmospheric chemistry programs, Antarctica has the potential to be the best understood region on Earth climatically. On 2 January 2003 the United States component of the International Trans Antarctic Scientific Expedition (US ITASE) arrived at South Pole having completed, over the period 1999-2003, $>$5000 km of over snow traverses that included much of West Antarctica and a portion of East Antarctica. During the traverses US ITASE focused on the collection of data that will allow the reconstruction of sub-annual scale climate variability and change in the chemistry of the atmosphere for the last 200+ years. In the process US ITASE collected an integrated, multi-disciplinary assemblage of data extending from the bed of the ice sheet ($>$3000 m) to $>$20 km in the atmosphere. Results from US ITASE offer new insights into the understanding of Southern Hemisphere climate variability (eg., temperature, accumulation rate, atmospheric circulation, atmospheric chemistry, climate forcing), with particular emphasis on the documentation of atmospheric teleconnections between the Pacific Ocean and West Antarctica.
DE: 1610 Atmosphere (0315, 0325)
DE: 1620 Climate dynamics (3309)
DE: 1699 General or miscellaneous
DE: 3344 Paleoclimatology
SC: Cryosphere [C]
MN: 2003 Fall Meeting