COLDEX
Reading Earth’s oldest ice
The Center for Oldest Ice Exploration is building a climate archive that reaches far beyond the continuous Antarctic ice-core record.
COLDEX—the Center for Oldest Ice Exploration—searches for ancient ice preserved in the Allan Hills blue-ice area of Antarctica. Ice recovered there now extends to at least 6.7 million years, making it the oldest directly dated ice yet recovered.
My work focuses on high-resolution impurity chemistry and the complex layering of the archive. These measurements help establish which sections preserve interpretable climate information and how folding, flow, and basal processes rearranged the original sequence.
At Allan Hills I worked with multiple drilling systems and supported geophysical surveys, including ground-penetrating radar, GPS, and autonomous phase-sensitive radio echo sounding.
