ure affects the ice streams. The team uses an aircraft fitted with geophysical instruments to image the surface and bed of the ice sheet, while measuring the gravity and magnetic signature, a clue to volcanism of the rock beneath (this year's survey focuses on Ice Stream "D").

Vostok: The World's Deepest and Oldest Ice Core Drilling to complete the world's deepest and oldest ice core will continue at Russia's Vostok Station in East Antarctica this season. Some 30 researchers from the United States, France, and Russia study the ice record, expected to stretch back perhaps half a million years. Studies of Vostok's ice have already shown a close link between climate over the past 200,000 years and changing concentrations of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. The drillers plan to halt at approximately 3650 meters depth, stopping above Lake Vostok, the subglacial lake beneath Vostok Station that is comparable in size to Lake Ontario. The lake and any life it may harbor have apparently been sealed off from the atmosphere for hundreds of thousands of years. NSF provides flight support for the project and grants to glaciologists studying the ice core.

More Favorite Martians? The news last summer that ALH84001, a meteorite from Mars found in Antarctica's Allan Hills, may contain fossils of early life startled scientists and the public. It also drew the spotlight to the Antarctic Search for Meteorites, akin to a bargain-priced space mission on snowmobiles led by Ralph Harvey of Case Western Reserve University. Antarctica is actually unrivaled in its abundance of meteorites. Since 1976, the program has found more than 7800 specimens, including samples of the Moon and Mars, expanding knowledge of the primeval nebula that have birth to the solar system. This season, the team returns to the Allan Hills and will search other locations as well.

AMANDA Expands Its Neutrino Search
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Contact: Lynn Simarski
lsimarsk@nsf.gov
703-306-1070
National Science Foundation
31-Oct-1996


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