Huntington man braves Antarctica to research how ancient ice reveals Earth's climate history

Jacob Chalif wakes up each morning, drinks coffee and braces for the day ahead. 

The Harborfields High School graduate’s job takes him to a truly unique workplace — Eastern Antarctica, where he harvests samples in search of the world’s oldest ice. The summer’s climate ranges between a balmy zero and -30 degrees.

Chalif, 25, a Huntington native and Dartmouth University graduate student, is part of a three-month mission with COLDEX — the Center for Oldest Ice Exploration — to record the Earth’s climate history through gases trapped in ice samples, with some dating back 6 million years.

He joined a team that hails from multiple universities and embarked on the mission through the end of January. The team arrived at McMurdo Station in Antarctica, about 2,400 miles south of New Zealand near the South Pole, and then took a plane to the base camp in Allan Hills, which is about 130 miles from the nearest American research station.

"Everything we do, we have to learn how to adapt it to the cold, whether that's brushing your teeth or getting dressed or taking out the trash. Yes, we take out the trash. All this we do in the cold," Chalif said this week during a video call with Newsday. "Once you adapt, it's astounding. You wake up in the morning, you look around, and all you see for miles and miles is ice and distant mountains. It's a beautiful place. I've never been anywhere like it in my life."

Researchers say by examining air pockets of carbon dioxide in the ice, scientists may be able to forecast modern climate change and how to address it. Scientists are able to extract small pockets of ancient atmospheric air, including gases, trapped in ice from centuries of ice ages, to reconstruct CO2 levels and show the temperature of the Earth over time. 

Chalif looks for impurities, such as sea salts and emissions in the atmosphere, including from humans and wildfires, that became trapped in ice.

"These are really minuscule amounts of air, but you can see these little air bubbles. They're there. We can extract the air and we can measure the past composition of atmospheric air," Chalif said. "It's a remarkable thing. It's kind of like a time machine. There's no other way to get a sample of air 100,000 years old and figure out what it tells us about climate."

The COLDEX project is sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation. It uses radar to find locations to collect ice that will ultimately give a 1.5- million-year-old record of the Earth's climate. That would nearly double the current record of the Earth’s climate that dates back about 800,000 years, according to the foundation.

Dartmouth Associate Professor Erich Osterberg, who specializes in ice core and climate change research, had Chalif in his class at Dartmouth. Osterberg later hired him to work in his ice lab at Dartmouth studying climate change. They published a study together in September that found the legacy of air pollution was preserved in ice cores in Greenland and Alaska.

"Jacob is a young climate superhero. Everyone can recognize what a great scientist he is," Osterberg said.

Osterberg said ice core samples showed ice ages 1 million years ago occurred every 40,000 years. Then about 800,000 years ago, ice ages jumped to occur every 100,000 years. He said the ice samples will show the natural changes in the earth’s climate compared to CO2 levels with humans today.

"Ice ages happened every 40,000 years, and then there was a fundamental change in the Earth climate between ice ages and a warming period, Osterberg said. "If we can understand why that happened, it will show the fundamentals for how Earth’s climate behaves and relationships with CO2 and temperature."

The research could also help scientists understand modern climate change and the human impact on global warming.

"The influence of humans is everywhere in the iceberg record," Chalif said, noting that there are signs of melting in Western Antarctica that could lead to sea level change that could affect Long Island.

Osterberg said sea level rise will be a "forever problem" that will be hard to stop once ice starts melting in Antarctica and Greenland.

"When I think about Antarctica, it’s all about sea level rise, and Western Antarctica is the heart of the beast and the crux of our problem," Osterberg said. "I think about the future climate impacts on the coastline, and it is going to have a crucial impact on coastal communities like Long Island."

Chalif’s team is expected to collect about 20,000 pounds of ice core samples to be sent to a lab for study in Denver.

While stationed in Antarctica, Chalif rests in a sleeping bag built for extreme cold in an unheated tent. He said he can’t venture outside with any exposed skin, which could be vulnerable to frostbite. Windstorms can also blow snow, making visibility in the arctic desert nearly impossible, he said.

The group of researchers gathers each morning in a heated tent, where they have access to Starlink internet and video calls. Chalif said he uses email and calls his mother, the farm manager at Bayard Cutting Arboretum in Great River, who told him about Long Island’s drought.

"Usually when you do arctic field work, it means being out of communication. Over the past few years, that landscape has completely changed," Chalif said. "Every day, for a little bit, I get to call back home and talk to family, which is really wonderful."

News of Chalif’s work has also spread to his alma mater at Harborfields High School, where Chalif was a top scholar in his class. Chalif’s former teachers marveled at his research in Antarctica after he said he was inspired during his science classes.

"He was always inquisitive and challenging in class. He wouldn’t just accept an answer and wanted to dig deeper," Chalif’s ninth-grade research teacher Michael Pinto said. "It’s pretty incredible to be going Antarctica. A small sliver of scientists get to go there, and it’s an incredible thing to get to go there to study climate change."

By John Asbury

john.asbury@newsday.comJohnAsbury

John Asbury is a breaking news and general assignment reporter. He has been with Newsday since 2014 and previously worked at The Press-Enterprise in Riverside, California.