Submitted by Anonymous on Fri, 12/16/2011 - 06:34
Forums
Space Weather Monitoring on the Antarctic Plateau

Hi there, I see you went in tunnels 30 feet below the surface of the ice. If it is so dry there, it must take a long time to build up 30 feet of ice. Do you or anyone else know about how long it would have taken to build up that ice? To put it another way, how old is the ice in the tunnels? Thanks! Joe

Tue, 12/20/2011 - 08:46

Michelle Brown

Hi Joe,
Sorry for the delay in responding, I've been asking around and it seems like the ice tunnel may not be as old as one might expect. The buildings here at the pole cause a lot of snow drift. In fact, trucks push and haul out the snow that has drifted around the buildings just about every day. Since other buildings have been around longer than the ice tunnels, it is possible that the compacted snow we were tunneling through is fairly recent. One [published paper](http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=13&ved=0CDc...) suggests the age of the Antarctic Ice Sheet is about 500,000 years old, but the data is unreliable since the ice at the bottom of the ice sheet is harder to calculate the age from.
I'll keep investigating this topic, but it seems like a trickier question than one may think!
Sincerely,
Michelle