Budding scientists from the Upper Valley are getting thrills and chills - literally - at youth camps hosted in Hanover by the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, or CRREL. It’s run by the Army Corps of Engineers. Researchers often work in Greenland and Antarctica, but this summer a few have stayed here to teach young people how to conduct experiments about climate change.
Zoe Courville often spends her summers in East Antarctica collecting and analyzing ice samples. But today she is teaching kids in Hanover, passing around a translucent cylinder the size of a frozen juice can. She has packed it with layers of ice, laced with grit, to simulate what she usually finds in the frigid field.
“As you get deeper and deeper in the ice you’re getting older and older ice and because we’re in areas where it’s cold enough that it rarely melts you are left with a record of the climate. So you can tell temperature, based on the isotopes of water; you can see different pollutants and different parts of ice that have been entrapped in there and that can also tell you something about the climate as you drill deeper and deeper,” she explains.
Hailey Napier, from Woodstock, takes careful notes as she peers at the ice cylinder.
“I see at least five layers, I think,” she says.
Step two—sawing the layers apart.
“So now we’re going to cut this core according to the layers they have identified in it. So who wants to start sawing?” Courville asks.
One volunteer is a tall, lean kid named Max Wonsavage. His grandfather actually worked at this lab once, and experimented on real ice in Antarctica. Some of that curiosity seems to have rubbed off on Max.
“I’m just really interested in chemistry and science in general and I seem to have a talent for it. I’m just intrigued by it,” he says.
The teenagers sawing through solid ice are just the kind of hard-working adventurers the Army Corps of Engineers hopes to recruit, eventually. Organizers of this camp say the average age of researchers is creeping up, so they need to lure the next generation—especially traditionally under-represented women—into the field.
The campers troop outdoors to drill into a larger core of ice.
As Hailey Napier and Maddie Blewitt wait for their turn with the auger, they explain why this research about climate change is so important, especially for their generation.
“I think it’s important to be prepared for the future and what it might be like and we’re going to live there, so…” Hailey pauses.
Maddie jumps into the conversation.
“We can also figure out more of the past because the air bubbles trap, like, carbon dioxide levels so we can see what kind of impact we are making in the atmosphere and see what we need to do to make it better,” she says.
The Hands-On Investigation and Laboratory Learning—or CHILL—camps continue through Aug. 8. They are also being held in two local schools. They are being offered free for local students who signed up this spring on a first-come, first-served basis.
