HOW TO READ A GLACIER
IT’S NOT ONLY THE TUNDRA, MOUNTAINS, RIVERS AND FORESTS OF
the Yukon that are focus points of climate change research, so too are its most inhospitable ice-bound places. The territory is home to some of the oldest glacial ice on the North American continent, on the slopes of Canada’s highest summit: Mount Logan. Given its altitude and low average annual temperatures, Mount Logan’s summit ice is spared from annual summer melt and, therefore, holds critical climate information dating back roughly 30,000 years. It’s the reason this lonely windswept redoubt in the heart of Kluane National Park and Reserve attracted the attention of Alison Criscitiello, a world-leading glaciologist and director of the University of Alberta’s Ice Core Lab.
Criscitiello studies ancient ice to better understand climate change on a scale of thousands of years, not decades. She also happens to be an expert mountaineer. In 2021, Criscitiello led a team of researchers on a mission to drill ice cores from Mount Logan’s summit plateau. Living for more than two weeks at high altitude and battling -40 C temperatures, the team managed to collect more than 300 metres of ice core weighing 900 kilograms. Getting the cores off the mountain and back to the lab in Edmonton was “epic,” says Criscitiello.
“Helicopter sling-loads of ice were taken off the summit plateau, to a freezer sea-can [shipping container] I had staged at Silver City [the gravel airstrip in Kluane National Park and Reserve]. Once all sling-loads reached the sea-can, it was trucked across the country to Edmonton,” Criscitiello says. “I hired someone to sit and babysit the freezer sea-can for the whole time it was out there receiving ice.”
Back at the lab is where the hard science began. As of spring 2024, Criscitiello and her fellow researchers were close to completing the analysis and dating of the ice cores. By studying ancient ice, scientists can determine what the atmospheric conditions were like long ago when the glacier-building snow fell and how ice sheets and glaciers responded to different climatic conditions. The hope is that by peering through this looking glass, scientists will gain a better understanding of the “how” and “why” of climate change in the past and, therefore, improve their ability to predict how the climate will change in the future.