Sérgio H. Faria, Ikerbasque Research Professor and Ramon y Cajal Fellow at BC3, is participating in the EastGRIP 2018 field season from 21 July to 11 August 2018. His main task will be to supervise the ice-core line-scan operations. Line-scanning is a fundamental part of ice-core logging and processing (these are the procedures that follow drilling, with the purpose of uniquely identifying the core pieces in terms of depth, age, and paleoclimate records). An ice-core line-scanner is a device for digitally recording the visual stratigraphy of ice cores continually and in high-resolution (≈0.1 mm/pixel). Details about the device and its methods can be found in the book that I have recently written and published (Faria et al., 2018). Essentially, an ice-core line-scanner consists of a high-resolution digital camera that scans a metre-long ice-core slab lengthwise, recording in the process variations in the optical properties of the ice, and consequently revealing its optical stratigraphy (which is one of several ways of identifying the paleoclimate records of the ice core).
BC3 is the only research institution in the Iberian Peninsula participating directly in this ambitious project. This has been made possible thanks to the close collaboration of BC3 with the Japanese EastGRIP Team, in particular with the Nagaoka University of Technology (NUT) and the National Institute for Polar Research (NIPR), in Tokyo.
