The Current - Drilling into Arctic ice to spy 20,000 years into the past

Episode Date: May 9, 2025

A small group of Canadian and Danish scientists have been drilling deep into the ice on Axel Heiberg Island, on the western edge of the Arctic Ocean. Ice core scientist Alison Criscitiello explains why drilling into the ice cap can give us a glimpse into the Earth’s past.

How did the internet go from this? You could actually find what you were looking for right away, bound to this. I feel like I'm in hell. Spoiler alert, it was not an accident. I'm Cory Doctorow, host of Who Broke the Internet from CBC's Understood. In this four-part series, I'm going to tell you

why the internet sucks now, whose fault it is, and my plan to fix it. Find Who Broke the Internet on whatever terrible app you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current Podcast. Alex Hyberg, Axel Hyberg Island is on the western edge of the Arctic Ocean. It is usually an uninhabited sheet of ice, but lately this Island has been getting a flurry of excited visitors. Since April, a small group of Canadian and

Danish scientists have drilling deep into the ice cap, some 600 meters down to pardon me, 20,000 years into our past is how they are trying to get into what is in that ice. And part of this is about understanding the past, but part of it is also about trying to protect this planet and the things that make it special. Alison Crisitello is an ice core scientist, director of the Ice Core Lab at the University of Alberta, and she is on Axel Heiberg Island this morning. Alison, good morning.

Good morning, thanks for having me. Thanks for being here. Can you describe where you are? Just place us on a map. Pretty far north, we're almost exactly at 80 degrees north in the Canadian Hieratic on a little island. What does it look like where you are? Well, you know, there's actually more terrain than they're often is that at ice core camps, we can see some beautiful peaks in the distance, but other than that, it's just, it's a bit of flat white nothing.

It's beautiful. And so aside from being in a beautiful place of flat white nothing, why are you there? I said that you're drilling into the ice cap. Tell me more about why you're there. Well, there are a few science goals with this project, but the main one is to drill what we think will be about a 600 meter deep ice core containing 10 to 20,000 years of Arctic climate history. And it's a really, really special spot because Axel Heiberg, where we are, is it's kind of right up against the Arctic Ocean.

So it has the power to contain really important and new information about Arctic Ocean variability in the past and things we may not know about Arctic climate variability in this part of the high Arctic over long time periods. But there's some other goals as well, but that's kind of the main one. How does this work? You are drilling samples. The plan is to go, as I said, 600 meters down, it's taller than the CN tower, taller than many, many buildings in this country. Tell me about how you go about doing this. Well, we have, there's a Danish drill here, Dr. Dol Jensen from Copenhagen and University of Manitoba. It's their drill.

And this drill is a drill that drills about two meters at a time. And it's big. We build a big tent around it so we can work in all weather, and we drill two meters at a time until we're done. I guess to give you an idea, I've been here for maybe a month and a week now, and we're at 465 meters today, trying to get to 600 before the end of this month when there'll be some surface melt and conditions on the surface that make it difficult or impossible to land planes to demobilize us.

So it's yeah, and it's in the drill, we keep it running all hours except midnight to 8 a.m. We run on shifts and it takes a lot of people, yeah, to do something like this, working really hard in the cold and yeah, the shift work piece is just to get it done as efficiently as possible so we can do the whole thing in two months basically. And in doing this, I mean, part of this is about like going back in time, right? Like the things, what you are reaching are deposits and evidence of things that happened hundreds of years ago.

So when you're 400 meters or so down, where are you in kind of the vast sweep of time? Ooh, that's a good question and I don't have the answer. We have, we've actually identified using electrical conductivity in the field, we have identified some volcanic eruptions which let us know certain ages in the ice, but outside of that right now the age scale is a guess. So 465 meters, I mean we could make a bit of a guess, but that's what it would be at

the moment. And the other piece that you kind of just touched on actually is that time isn't linear with an ice core like this. So as you go farther down in the ice and you're going farther back in time, each meter of ice contains more and more time as you go down, because it's more and more compressed. And you can get vast amounts of time in very short, like depth ranges as you get really deep. So it's hard to, until we're there and we use a lot of different methods to date it, we don't actually know how old it is in the field.

Once you have the samples, what happens next? I mean, you have to get them out and then figure out how to study them? Yeah, well, the next step is there's a bit of a involved cold chain to get them back to Edmonton. But from where we are here, they get, they get loaded into six, six meters of ice, which is about a hundred pounds, get loaded into these ice core boxes.

And then the ice core boxes go on a small fixed-wing plane to Eureka and then to Yellow Knife. And so I think we've flown over 7,200 pounds of ice out already on sort of flights of opportunity that have been anywhere near our camp up here on the ice cap, have gotten ice out already on sort of flights of opportunity that have been anywhere near our camp up here on the ice cap, have gotten ice out to Eureka and then onto Yellowknife. And from there it goes in a freezer truck like on the surface from Yellowknife to the Canadian ice core lab at University of Alberta. And what are you hoping to learn from these samples? I mean, I'd said in some ways this is about learning about the past, but also trying to

figure out ways that we can safeguard our future. Tell me about what you're trying to learn from these samples. Well, that's hard to answer in just a couple of minutes, but I think, you know, kind of broadly stepping back, understanding how the ocean and atmosphere and sea ice and glaciers and different compartments of our Earth system and how they interact is incredibly important for understanding and predicting future change. And we have very little knowledge of how, you know,

small ice caps like this have interacted with those other parts of the climate system in the past over these really long thousands of years, you know, time periods. But yeah, I would say one aspect that really is quite unique about this core and this location is that it should provide really unique insight into how Arctic Ocean sea ice has varied in the past over these really long time periods and how that is related to how climate and glaciers have changed in the Arctic in the past. And again, of course, this is really to help us understand the modern changes we're seeing

with Arctic sea ice decline and things like this. But yeah, I wanted to mention too, we actually have dueling drills at the moment. There's a second drill that's maybe 200 meters away. And the reason that we're simultaneously now in the month of May drilling these other shorter cores, they're about 70 meters and they go back to about 1860, is to also simultaneously look at environmental contaminants that get atmospherically transported to the far north. And those require a lot of sample volume and there are things that we kind of look at annually so we can understand both the transport mechanisms of contaminants that are sourced

and produced very far from here, but get transported to pristine places like this and then can impact remote communities and ecosystems and animals very far away. So that's another kind of big goal and hope scientifically that we glean out of some of these course. Just before I let you go, I mean, this is, you're describing it, this is hard work in a remote area, in unforgiving often conditions, but the way that you talk about it, you have this sense of enthusiasm and wonder about it. What do you love about the work that you do? I'm glad I still have that after this month. It has been particularly cold.

I'm a high altitude mountaineer by trade, I guess. And I think there's something about that aspect, at least for me, that, yeah, that's part of the answer to that question. I just love being in places that are harsh, I think, because they produce your whole world down to simple things that matter and allow you to stay very focused where you are and really present. You know, and like all I've done today is turn snow into water so I can drink water and make sure my tent is dug out. And I think I like the simple part of it. And it's really quite a cool thing when that's combined with a big science goal. And I work

with incredible people. Generally, generally, it's in the end, despite what I just said, it's really the people that make the place. But you're also doing, I mean, I've read this, I mean, you're a mom as well, and so you're doing this, you think about your kids and the work that you're doing there as well, and what kind of future, and what kind of world they will inherit.

Yeah. Well, you're saying all the important things. I, yeah, I mean, that's probably the hardest aspect, I would say, is being separated, yeah, from. Um, I have two little girls and a wife and um, gone from them a lot of the time. And I I find it both really difficult and incredibly motivating. Um, yeah, because we're talking about um, what we're handing the next generation This work is fascinating and This work is fascinating and I mean I don't know whether lucky is the right word but it feels like you're really lucky to be there in that place and doing this work and seeing something that most of us will never ever ever get a chance to see. I'm glad to talk to you about it. Good luck

with it and stay, I was gonna say stay warm but I don't know if that's possible. Stay as warm as possible Allison and thanks for talking to us. Thank you so much. Alison Crisitello is the director of the ICE Core Lab at the University of Alberta. And we reached her as she and her team, as you heard, are getting samples from deep, deep, deep in the ice on Axel Heiberg Island in Canada's High Arctic.