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NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY INC

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 11-5). The LISSARD project (Lake and Ice Stream Subglacial Access Research Drilling) is one of three research components of the WISSARD integrative initiative (Whillans Ice Stream Subglacial Access Research Drilling) that is being funded by the Antarctic Integrated System Science Program of NSF's Office of Polar Programs, Antarctic Division. The overarching scientific objective of WISSARD is to assess the role of water beneath a West Antarctic ice stream in interlinked glaciological, geological, microbiological, geochemical, and oceanographic systems. The LISSARD component of WISSARD focusses on the role of active subglacial lakes in determining how fast the West Antarctic ice sheet loses mass to the global ocean and influences global sea level changes. The importance of Antarctic subglacial lakes has only been recently recognized, and the lakes have been identified as high priority targets for scientific investigations because of their unknown contributions to Ice sheet stability under future global warming scenarios. LISSARD has several primary science goals: A) To provide an observational basis for improving treatments of subglacial hydrological and mechanical processes in models of ice sheet mass balance and stability; B) To reconstruct the past history of ice stream stability by analyzing archives of past basal water and ice flow variability contained in subglacial sediments, porewater, lake water, and basal accreted ice: C) To provide background understanding of subglacial lake environments to benefit RAGES and GBASE (the other two components of the WISSARD project); and D) To synthesize data and concepts developed as part of the project to determine whether subglacial lakes play an important role in (de)stabilizing Antarctic ice sheets. We propose an unprecedented synthesis of approaches to studing ice sheet processes, including: (1) satellite remote sensing, (2) surface geophysics, (3) borehole observations and measurements and, (4) basal and subglacial sampling. The complete abstract for this award is available in Research.gov at: www.research.gov.

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