Peter Neff: The Ice Core Adventurer Unraveling Climate Secrets Beneath Antarctica’s Frozen Surface

This marked Neff’s seventh expedition to the frigid continent. “Engaging in science in Antarctica is always thrilling,” he remarks. This journey certainly did not fall short in that aspect. Following their arrival near the research area and unloading several cargo loads of equipment and supplies from the helicopter, a violent storm struck, essentially trapping Neff, Andreasen, their engineer, Etienne Gros, and their South Korean colleagues, covering Andreasen in her tent for a day and postponing the commencement of their research. The visibility was so poor that Neff couldn’t spot the safety flag he had set up between his and Andreasen’s tents. “I felt an immediate surge of panic, but I texted Julia, and she was okay,” Neff shares. Once the storm subsided, Neff’s nervousness shifted to the tasks ahead, and he pondered the time the storm had cost the team. “We were in a standstill for the following 12 or 24 hours, trying to recover lost time.”

Luckily, the team’s gear remained undamaged and uncovered, allowing them to start working at an intense pace. Neff and Gros operated the ice-core drill, transferring the frozen cylinders they retrieved one-by-one to Andreasen, who sliced, categorized, and packed them into Styrofoam coolers, preparing them for transport to freezers on the icebreaker and, eventually, to storage facilities in South Korea. The task was icy and repetitive, yet the favorable weather persisted, and core by core, the team was accumulating decades’ worth of climate data on the isolated ice dome. It was also quite loud. “People always inquire how tranquil and quiet Antarctica is,” Neff states. “Well, that’s not the case. We have generators operating almost continuously. Occasionally, we would turn them off just to relish some quiet.”

After a span of 10 days, Neff and the team retrieved the final core from a depth of 150 meters. “Observing the layers of time beneath your feet is truly astonishing,” Neff comments. “Processing will take a couple of years, but soon we will have validation from the ice cores that will yield fairly direct insights regarding the atmosphere.”

Neff was raised in Vancouver, Washington, and commenced his geology research shortly after his arrival on campus when he noticed a flyer pinned on a corkboard at a student center. “It stated, ‘Lab work with potential fieldwork in Greenland and Antarctica.’ That was all it took to capture my interest, and I went ahead to email Eric Steig,” Neff reminisces. “I became a geology enthusiast after my first quarter at UW.”