Volume CXXXIII, Number 11 November 30, 2001 f

Arctic exhibit showcases ancient ice
TED REINERT
STAFF WRITER

"There's not that many places where you can go see a piece of ice from the bottom of the Greenland ice cores," said Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum curator Genevieve LeMoine.

Ancient Ice, Cool Science is featured in the Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum. (Henry Coppola, Bowdoin Orient)

It took five years for a team of Americans and a team of Europeans to each drill two miles down into Greenland ice. In 1993 they hit bedrock. The bottom ice is 400 years old. A piece of that ice is the centerpiece of the Peary-MacMillan Museum's new exhibition "Ancient Ice, Cool Science: Climate Change in the North."

The National Ice Core Laboratory in Denver recently put out a notice to Arctic researchers that some of the ice was no longer needed for study. The Bowdoin museum expressed interest and got a piece for the exhibition. A standard household freezer was customized to keep the ice, lit with heatless fiberoptics, under -20 degrees Celsius, while a generator and your everyday, not-400-year-old ice packed underneath it ensure that the ice will survive power failures.

The exhibit will run through August 2003. "We wanted to highlight the fact that climate is changing now and the Arctic is particularly important," said LeMoine. The world's polar regions tend to be particularly sensitive to climate change and are a good source for meteorological history. Through testing the chemistry of the ice, the chemistry of the atmosphere at the time of freezing can be discovered. Through this method major volcanic eruptions can be mapped because they left sulfate in the atmosphere, and use of lead can be charted, from leaded gasoline in the 20th century to the extensive smelting of the Roman Empire.

A good portion of the exhibit is devoted to the Norse settlements in Greenland, with a variety of artifacts. Thomas H. McGovern, Professor of Anthropology at City University of New York, delivered a lecture here, "'Til Death Takes Us Or the World Ends: Climate Change and the Demise of Norse Greenland," on November 9, the opening of the exhibition.

"Following Erik the Red, Norse colonizers moved to Greenland and established a typical Medieval community beginning around 980 A.D. This was a warm period in the North Atlantic, and the Norse settled where they could find pasture for cattle, sheep, and goats. The colonists survived for nearly 500 years but eventually disappeared, a casualty of cooling climate coupled with a rigid, top heavy, social structure that impeded adaptation," explains a placard in the exhibit.

According to LeMoine, the 1300s-1400s marked the beginning of the Little Ice Age, a period of global cooling. The summers more than the winters killed them: with cold, wet conditions, the Norsemen could not produce enough to survive the winter. The Inuit people have managed to live there, but the Norse were unwilling to adapt their life style to become hunter-gatherers.

The exhibit compares this to 1816 in New England, known as the "year without a summer." The season that year was much colder and drier than usual, limiting the growing season to a record 68 days in southern Maine and leading to widespread crop failure.

Also featured in the exhibit is 45 million year old wood, which is mysteriously unpetrified - a series of unusual conditions kept the wood preserved up to the point where the ice took over and it was frozen in time. And dinosaur bones found in the tundra are displayed as well. The polar climate was once sufficiently mild that dinosaurs could live there, although the short seasons and long periods of darkness still applied, therefore an environment existed that has no parallel on the earth today.

"Ancient Ice, Cool Science" presents the work of researchers from around the world, including Canada, Denmark, the United States, and Bowdoin - physics professor Mark Battle, Coastal Studies Center Director Anne Henshaw, and Arctic Studies Program Director Susan Kaplan. Some of the new information that LeMoine is most excited about is the speed of ice age transition. At the end of the last Ice Age, average temperatures rose drastically and permanently in as little as 10 years.

The Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum is open on Tuesday-Saturday 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., Sunday 2:00 to 5:00 p.m., closed Mondays and National Holidays.