Friday, April 18, 2025 at 10:30am CT
Location: UTIG Seminar Conference Room
J.J. Pickle Research Campus
10100 Burnet Road, Bldg. 196/ROC 1.603
Online: Find the meeting link in the calendar buttons below or request a link from costa@ig.utexas.edu. You must be logged in to a Zoom account (why do I need to sign in?).
Speaker: Alexandra (Allie) Balter-Kennedy, Visiting Scholar, Earth and Climate Sciences, Tufts University
Host: Benjamin Keisling
Title: Update from the GreenDrill project: Evidence for reduced northern Greenland Ice Sheet extent during the Pleistocene from subglacial rock and sediment
Abstract: Sediment and bedrock beneath modern ice sheets archive evidence of reduced ice-sheet extent when climate conditions were favorable for deglaciation, including during the Holocene and other Pleistocene interglacials. In this talk, I will highlight ongoing work from the GreenDrill project, which is a targeted effort to recover and analyze subglacial material at strategically selected locations in northern Greenland. In 2023 and 2024, we deployed two US NSF Ice Drilling Program drills and collected a total of ~22 m of subglacial rock and sediment. I’ll focus primarily on a core collected beneath the 500-m-thick Prudhoe Dome, an ice dome in northwest Greenland, which records ice-free periods through at least the Pleistocene, including the Holocene. Ice-sheet modeling suggests that such ice-free conditions at Prudhoe Dome require, at minimum, GrIS-wide mass loss equivalent to a 0.19–0.73 m global sea-level contribution.