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Dorthe Dahl-Jensen (born 8 September 1958, Copenhagen, Denmark) [1] is a Danish palaeoclimatology professor and researcher at the Centre for Ice and Climate at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen in Denmark. Her primary field is the study of ice and climate, specifically the reconstruction of climate records from ice cores and borehole data; ice flow models to date ice cores; continuum mechanical properties of anisotropic ice; ice in the solar system; and the history and evolution of the Greenland Ice Sheet. [2]
Dahl-Jensen has an M.Sc. In Geophysics (1984) and a Ph.D. in Geophysics (1988) from the University of Copenhagen. [1]
As a student in 1980, Dahl-Jensen took part in ice-core drilling at the Dye 3 site on the Greenland ice sheet, a project led by Willi Dansgaard. [3] Although Dansgaard had a rule that no women were allowed at the drilling site, he allowed Dahl-Jensen to participate. [4] [5] She and her drilling partner Jørgen Peder Steffensen later married. [6]
She was hired by Copenhagen's Niels Bohr Institute as an associate professor in 1997; [1] in 2007, she became head of its Centre for Ice and Climate. [5]
Dahl-Jensen led the North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling (NEEM) project: a 14-nation research team which spent four years drilling and analysing a 2,540 m (8,330 ft) ice core reaching back to the last interglacial period 130–113 thousand years BP, the results of which were published in the journal Nature in 2013. [7] The paper suggests, based on ice sheet simulations, that during the last interglacial Greenland might have contributed around 2 m (6 ft 7 in) to the observed 4–8 m (13–26 ft) sea level rise. This implies that Antarctic ice melting was a significant factor.
In 2015, a collaborative group of researchers from the U.S., Germany, and Denmark will study Renland, Greenland area for deep ice core drilling. [ needs update ]
Another project in early stages is a deep ice core drilling project, also located in Greenland which is expected to shed light on the northeast Greenland ice stream and its contributions to a rise in sea level. This could give details on what to expect for future sea level rise due to ice sheet mass loss in Greenland. According to The Guardian in 2021 [8] :
Large-scale melting of the Greenland ice sheet would have long-term global consequences, beyond rising sea levels. It could halt the Gulf Stream ocean current, with potential knock-on effects on the Amazon rainforest and tropical monsoons.
The Niels Bohr Institute is a research institute of the University of Copenhagen. The research of the institute spans astronomy, geophysics, nanotechnology, particle physics, quantum mechanics, and biophysics.
An ice core is a core sample that is typically removed from an ice sheet or a high mountain glacier. Since the ice forms from the incremental buildup of annual layers of snow, lower layers are older than upper ones, and an ice core contains ice formed over a range of years. Cores are drilled with hand augers or powered drills; they can reach depths of over two miles (3.2 km), and contain ice up to 800,000 years old.
The Last Interglacial, also known as the Eemian, was the interglacial period which began about 130,000 years ago at the end of the Penultimate Glacial Period and ended about 115,000 years ago at the beginning of the Last Glacial Period. It corresponds to Marine Isotope Stage 5e. It was the second-to-latest interglacial period of the current Ice Age, the most recent being the Holocene which extends to the present day. During the Last Interglacial, the proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere was about 280 parts per million. The Last Interglacial was one of the warmest periods of the last 800,000 years, with temperatures comparable to and at times warmer than the contemporary Holocene interglacial, with the maximum sea level being up to 6 to 9 metres higher than at present, with global ice volume likely also being smaller than the Holocene interglacial.
Dansgaard–Oeschger events, named after palaeoclimatologists Willi Dansgaard and Hans Oeschger, are rapid climate fluctuations that occurred 25 times during the last glacial period. Some scientists say that the events occur quasi-periodically with a recurrence time being a multiple of 1,470 years, but this is debated. The comparable climate cyclicity during the Holocene is referred to as Bond events.
Willi Dansgaard was a Danish paleoclimatologist. He was Professor Emeritus of Geophysics at the University of Copenhagen and a member of the Royal Danish Academy of Science and Letters, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Icelandic Academy of Sciences, and the Danish Geophysical Society.
The Greenland Ice Core Project (GRIP) was a research project organized through the European Science Foundation (ESF). The project ran from 1989 to 1995, with drilling seasons from 1990 to 1992. In 1988, the project was accepted as an ESF-associated program, and the fieldwork was started in Greenland in the summer of 1989.
The Greenland Ice Sheet Project (GISP) was a decade-long project to drill ice cores in Greenland that involved scientists and funding agencies from Denmark, Switzerland and the United States. Besides the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), funding was provided by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Danish Commission for Scientific Research in Greenland. The ice cores provide a proxy archive of temperature and atmospheric constituents that help to understand past climate variations.
The drilling site of the North Greenland Ice Core Project (NGRIP or NorthGRIP) is near the center of Greenland (75.1 N, 42.32 W, 2917 m, ice thickness 3085). Drilling began in 1999 and was completed at bedrock in 2003. The cores are cylinders of ice 11 centimeters in diameter that were brought to the surface in 3.5-meter lengths. The NGRIP site was chosen to extract a long and undisturbed record stretching into the last glacial, and it succeeded. The site was chosen for a flat basal topography to avoid the flow distortions that render the bottom of the GRIP and GISP cores unreliable. Unusually, there is melting at the bottom of the NGRIP core – believed to be due to a high geothermal heat flux locally. This has the advantage that the bottom layers are less compressed by thinning than they would otherwise be: NGRIP annual layers at 10.5 kyr age are 1.1 cm thick, twice the GRIP thicknesses at equal age.
The Older Dryas was a stadial (cold) period between the Bølling and Allerød interstadials, about 14,000 years Before Present, towards the end of the Pleistocene. Its date range is not well defined, with estimates varying by 400 years, but its duration is agreed to have been around two centuries.
Dye 3 is an ice core site and previously part of the DYE section of the Distant Early Warning (DEW) line, located at in Greenland. As a DEW line base, it was disbanded in years 1990/1991.
Camp Century was an Arctic United States military scientific research base in Greenland. situated 240 km (150 mi) east of Pituffik Space Base. When built, Camp Century was publicized as a demonstration for affordable ice-cap military outposts and a base for scientific research.
NEEM Camp was a small research facility on the northern Greenland Ice Sheet, used as a base for ice core drilling. It was located about 313 km east of the closest coast, Peabody Bay in northern Greenland, 275 km northwest of the historical ice sheet camp North Ice, and 484 km east-northeast of Siorapaluk, the closest settlement. There was one heavy-duty tent for accommodation of the researchers during summer. Access was by skiway .
KumikoGoto-Azuma is an Antarctic palaeoclimatologist and glaciologist and Director of the Ice Core Research Center at the National Institute of Polar Research, Japan.
The Hans Egede Medal is awarded by the Royal Danish Geographical Society for outstanding services to geography, "principally for geographical studies and research in the Polar lands." It was instituted in 1916 and named after Hans Egede, a Danish missionary who established a mission in Greenland.
The East Greenland Ice-Core Project, known as EGRIP, is a scientific project that plans to retrieve an ice core from the Northeast Greenland ice stream. The first season in the field was 2015; the project was expected to be drilling through to the base of the ice sheet by 2020.
Siwan Davies FLSW is a Welsh professor of Physical Geography in the department of science at Swansea University.
Jérôme Chappellaz is a French glaciologist, geochemist and paleoclimatologist who is director of the French Polar Institute. A senior researcher at France's National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), he is a co-founder and chairman of the Ice Memory Foundation.
A geological event is a temporary and spatially heterogeneous and dynamic (diachronous) happening in Earth history that contributes to the transformation of Earth system and the formation of geological strata. Event stratigraphy was first proposed as a system for the recognition, study and correlation of the effects of important physical or biological events on the broader stratigraphical record.
Mary Remley Albert is an American earth scientist who is a Professor of Engineering at Dartmouth College. She studies snow physics and transport phenomena. She is executive director of the US Ice Drilling Program.
1980 was the year we found two youngsters (and they each other), who should later become prominent participants in our glaciological research: Dorthe Dahl-Jensen and Jørgen Peder Steffensen, both developing very well in teaching and research, she strongest in theory, he in practice and experiment.
Dansgaard had an arbitrary rule that reflected the hidebound traditions of his field: no women could come to the drilling camp. But he had relented in this [Dahl-Jensen's] case.
In 2007, she was appointed as head of Willi Dansgaard's old department – which is now called the 'Centre for Ice and Climate' and under her leadership it remains one of the world's leading research institutes in the climate field – moreover with a gender distribution that is almost 50/50.
Steffensen...pointed out that, if you believed the climate to be inherently unstable, the last thing you'd want to do is conduct a vast unsupervised experiment on it