Ice spy Ice spy Ice spy
Geology nerd Peter Neff goes way down under studying ice cores in Antarctica to learn more about climate change.
By Chris Quirk | Photos by Peter Neff | March 2025
The plan was bold, and unusual for Antarctica. Peter Neff, ’09, ’12, had to reach a remote location on the West Antarctic shore, called Canisteo Peninsula, to obtain the ice cores he needed for his climate research. Inaccessible by land and too perilous to reach by sea, Neff opted for a helicopter airlift from a South Korean icebreaker offshore to ferry him, his team, and their gear to their destination. “Helicopters are really powerful pieces of equipment, but they're also really delicate,” Neff says. “If the sticker that's labeling your cargo blows off and gets ingested by the helicopter, you're done. Everything's done.”
Neff, a polar glaciologist and assistant professor at the University of Minnesota, went to Canisteo to drill ice cores that could provide a clearer picture of the history of weather patterns in the region. Currently, meteorological information about the area has to be inferred as there is no observational equipment as you would find in places like the renowned McMurdo Station. What makes Neff’s chosen spot, near the Thwaites Glacier, so important is that melt and retreat there could be a harbinger for a larger glacial melt across West Antarctica, which could raise sea levels by as much as 10 meters by 2300. “It would be a slow-motion collapse on the human timescale,” Neff explains. “That said, there’s a hopeful opportunity here, based on our decisions as a society. If we get our carbon emissions under control relatively quickly, we could prevent some of the high-end collapse scenarios and limit how much and how fast sea level rise comes from Antarctic ice melt.”
Fortunately for Neff, prior to landing in Antarctica, he had some practice with helicopter airlifts thanks to ice-core research he has been conducting at Mount Waddington in British Columbia with his UW mentor and former professor, Eric Steig, the Rabinowitz Endowed Professor in the Department of Earth and Space Sciences. Neff, along with University of Minnesota graduate student Julia Andreasen, who participated in the Thwaites Glacier expedition, had a chance to rehearse their procedures in an only slightly less forbidding theater high up in the Canadian Coast Mountains. “That project absolutely fed directly into what we were doing six months later in Antarctica,” says Neff. “To be operating around the helicopter with that intensity and deliberateness was extremely helpful.”
“Seeing the layers of time underneath your feet is really remarkable.”
Peter Neff
This was Neff’s seventh voyage to the coldest continent. “It’s always intense doing science in Antarctica,” he says. And this trip did not disappoint in that regard. After landing near their research site and unloading multiple cargo loads of equipment and gear from the helicopter, a ferocious storm walloped Neff, Andreasen, their engineer, Etienne Gros, and their South Korean teammates, burying Andreasen in her tent for a day and delaying the start of research. Visibility was so bad that Neff couldn’t see the safety flag he had placed between his and Andreasen’s tents. “I was instantly panicked, but I texted Julia and she was alright,” says Neff. When the storm cleared, Neff’s anxiety turned to the work at hand, and how much time the storm had cost the team. “We were in limbo for the next 12 or 24 hours and trying to regain ground.”
Fortunately, the team’s equipment was intact and unburied, and they began work at a furious clip. Neff and Gros manned the ice-core drill, passing off the frozen cylinders they extracted one-by-precious-one to Andreasen, who trimmed, catalogued and packed them into Styrofoam coolers, ready for transport to freezers in the icebreaker, and eventually storage facilities in South Korea. The work was frigid and monotonous, but the decent weather held out, and core by core the team was banking decades of climate information on the remote ice dome. It was also loud. “People always ask me how peaceful and quiet Antarctica is,” Neff says. “Well, no. We have generators running almost all the time. Sometimes we would shut them off just to enjoy some silence.”
After 10 days, Neff and the team pulled up the last core from a depth of 150 meters. “Seeing the layers of time underneath your feet is really remarkable,” says Neff. “It’s going to take a couple of years to process, but soon we will have confirmation from the ice cores that will provide pretty direct information about the atmosphere.”
Neff grew up in Vancouver, Washington, and began his research in geology not long after arriving on campus when he spied a flier stuck on a corkboard at a student center. “It said, ‘Lab work with possible fieldwork in Greenland and Antarctica.’ That’s all I needed to hear, and I proceeded to email Eric Steig,” Neff recalls. “I was a geology nerd after my first quarter at UW.”