CONTACT:  Patricia Viets           FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
                                   7/24/97

A team of scientists sponsored by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration researching Earth's climate in ancient times, has obtained samples from a remote, ice-covered volcano in Bolivia that will provide information critical to the study of global climate change, the Commerce Department agency announced.

The scientists, led by Lonnie Thompson, a professor of geological science at Ohio State University, drilled into a 433-feet deep glacier that covers the top of 21,608-foot Mt. Sajama in a remote, high alpine area of Bolivia. They obtained ice cores for chemical and physical analyses that will provide a more extensive view of short-term climate variability in the South American Highlands. By looking at the information contained in ice records, scientists are able to unlock crucial clues to Earth's climate history.

The histories of the Bolivian ice cores will be integrated with those available from middle and high latitudes. These comparisons are essential to understanding the climate system. This information will also help extend back through millennia NOAA's long-term record of global climate change. The research is funded by the NOAA Paleoclimatology program element of NOAA's Office of Global Programs, all agencies of the Department of Commerce.

The scientists arrived at the base of Sajama in June and set up camps: base camp at 15,840 feet and high camp at 18,480 feet. The three-day trip to the summit allowed time for adjust to the change in elevation between base camp and the summit. Drilling for ice cores on the 21,608-foot summit began on June 26.

"The cores are a storehouse of many environmental records," Thompson said. "Major volcanic ash layers could be identified periodically throughout the cores along with other red and yellow dust layers. Both cores contain 30 meters of very clean ice near the bottom, which we speculate may date from the time when the ancient Lake Tauca covered over 43,000 square kilometers of a high plateau at the end of the last glacial stage some 14,000 years ago. "Sajama is a polar-type glacier frozen to its bed, even though it is only 18 degrees south of the Equator," Thompson explained. "We believe it will contain more than 20,000 years of history for this part of the world where we know very little about the climate."

In addition to the scientists from Ohio State University, a team from the University of Massachusetts' Climatology Laboratory is supporting the project with automatic weather stations, one of which was installed last year. The stations record hourly air temperature, relative humidity, pressure, wind speed and direction, solar radiation, snow temperature, and snow accumulation at the ice coring site. The data are transmitted to a NOAA GOES satellite and down-loaded in near real-time at the University of Massachusetts for processing.

The stations will provide data for the duration of the three-year project, giving scientists a modern calibration data set to be compared with data obtained from the ice cores. The weather station team successfully completed its work on Sajama, and went on to install another satellite-linked station on Nevado del Illimani, Bolivia, on July 17, to support ice core drilling there.

Information about the project can be found on the World Wide Web at: http://polarmet.mps.ohio-state.edu/Icecore/Bolivia.html
http://www-bprc.mps.ohio-state.edu/Icecore
http://www.geo.umass.edu/climate/sajama/saj97.html