A research team from Stony Brook University has departed for Antarctica in a final field mission supported by a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant, with the goal of studying changes in the Antarctic ice sheet and underlying geology. The team left on November 9, heading first to McMurdo Station in New Zealand before aiming to reach the South Pole around November 20.
Weisen Shen, associate professor in the Department of Geosciences and principal investigator for the project, is not joining this trip after leading two previous expeditions over the past two years. This season, three graduate students from the department will conduct the research work on site.
Shen emphasized his broader ambitions for Stony Brook’s role in polar science: “The long-term goal for us is not to do just seasonal projects,” he said. “But that sometime in the near future Stony Brook can maintain its own geophysical observatory long-term infrastructure.”
The current project seeks to better predict how changes in Antarctica’s ice sheet could impact global sea levels and local communities, including those near Long Island. According to Shen, “This ice sheet is 2.5 kilometers thick, sitting on the continent, and we know it is changing fast. But how fast? The sea level will rise and that will affect us here. Stony Brook Harbor, Port Jefferson Harbor, Northport Harbor….will they still be safe in the next 100 years? We want to monitor that piece of ice sheet because it will affect our local community.”
Shen noted similarities between his work in Antarctica and previous fieldwork in Kenya’s Turkana Basin but highlighted differences due to extreme conditions such as months without sunlight at the South Pole.
Graduate student Thomas Reilly described some of these differences: “At the South Pole, we submit our line to USAP South Pole (the United States Antarctic Program’s Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station) and they look at satellite imagery and detect if there’s any danger and if not, we just drive straight in one direction until the work is done,” Reilly said. “In Kenya, we’d drive about two kilometers and we’d have to make sure no one was following us. We’d put a node down as quickly as we possibly can, no markings around it, no anything, and try to take as good a picture as we can so we can find it next month. And then we get back in the car and do it 70 more times. So the two are very different, but both were good experiences.”
Andrew Groh, a first-year doctoral candidate working on new geophysical instrumentation for polar research, will be making his first trip to Antarctica.
Shen expressed hope that Stony Brook could establish permanent research infrastructure on the continent: “My goal is to facilitate some long-term infrastructure, but we’ll need a lot of resources to do that,” he said. “I want to help Stony Brook establish solid ground as a leader in polar science. I hope to have a chance to build that in the next three to five years. We have the connections and we have access to different parts of Antarctica. What we need now is resources to start.”
He also reflected on recruiting students with opportunities for unique fieldwork: “I told her [Hanxio Wu], ‘If you join us, we’ll put you in the field in Antarctica,’” said Shen.
Looking ahead at climate change impacts locally and globally remains central for Shen’s team: “We know that the problem will not go away,” he said. “You can make yourself blind and avoid talking about it, but the ice is still melting. The sea will still rise. It’s time for our university and our stakeholders to think about what more we can do both for the sake of educating our next generation portal researchers, but also to maintain infrastructure in a place that is critical to the future of Long Island residents.”
