NEW DELHI: An Indian-origin scientist in the US — who has a glacier in Antarctica named after him — will now be a key primary investigator in a USD 7 million project that aims to drill through the Greenland ice sheet to study how the mass of ice — rapidly melting due to climate change — may contribute to rising seas in the 21st century.
Sridhar Anandakrishnan, professor of geosciences at Penn State University, is part of an ambitious five-year project to study Greenland ice sheet named GreenDrill. The project received a USD 3 million research grant and USD 4 million in field operations support from the US National Science Foundation in June.
Melting of Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets is of importance as they directly affect global sea levels.According to NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA),the Greenland ice sheet has lost 3.8 trillion tons of ice between 1992 and 2018. According to estimates, it holds enough water to raise the sea level by 24 feet — even a few feet of sea level rise can have a drastic impact on coastal cities and low-lying islands.
The new project aims to analyse the rock beneath the Greenland ice sheet to determine its history — how often in the past has it grown or shrunk and by how much. “That history will help us understand what the future of the ice sheet might be in a warming world,” said Anandakrishnan.
The 58-year-old glaciologist said the project involves drilling a number of holes throughout the ice sheet to sample the rock below. “In order to plan and carry out that drilling work, we first need to know how thick the ice is and what are the conditions at the bottom? Or hard rock or sedimentary rock? All these things play into the selection of the location and the type of drill used. My role is to conduct the geophysical surveys using instruments like radar and seismic equipment to measure the ice thickness and properties of the bedrock.”
But this won’t be without challenges, admitted Anandakrishna who was born in New Delhi and grew up in Kanpur where his father was a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology(IIT) before becoming the vice-chancellor of Chennai’s Anna University.
as a key member of The Penn State Ice and Climate Exploration (PSICE) group, Anandakrishnan is no stranger to polar adventures. He has made more than 20 trips to Antarctica. In 2008, he was part of an expedition to examine Antarctica’s Thwaites glacier, part of West Antarctic Ice Sheet, whose bed topography he is now studying in detail. His contribution to Antarctic studies has led to a glacier being named Anandakrishnan Glacier after him in 2003.
In Greenland, the project team has already zeroed in on spots where the drilling will take place — Victoria Fjord, Prudhoe land, Dronning Louise Land and Hawatha Margin.
According to Anandakrishnan, these sites were chosen for several reasons. “The spots have ice over them that is thin enough to drill through quickly and yet thick enough so that the rock beneath will have been covered by the ice for a long time. Additionally, these sites ring the northern edge of the Greenland ice sheet allowing us to have certainty in our results — in other words if we only studied one site we may be unlucky, but if we include multiple sites and get similar answers about the history of the ice sheet, we can be more certain.”
Source: The Times Of India.