Peak study

Long, cylindrical ice cores are like books recounting our climate history, making Canada’s tallest mountain, Mount Logan, one of the world’s best libraries. This past spring, Alison Criscitiello and six other scientists travelled to Mount Logan to extract ice core samples from the summit, with support from the National Geographic Society.

Criscitiello is the director of the Canadian Ice Core Lab (CICL) at the University of Alberta, which is equipped to store and study ice cores from glaciers in mountain and polar areas. The cores are environmental records that have captured gas, pollen, dust, ions and isotopes that researchers use to study the air and climate of the past. Samples go back to 79,000 BCE and the collection also holds ice cores from Prince of Wales Icefield and the Agassiz, Devon, and Penny ice caps all along the Arctic Archipelago. 

In 2001 and 2002, the oldest ever ice-core record was collected from Mount Logan’s summit plateau. Criscitiello and her group returned to the summit in 2021/22 to expand their records, and to advance other research by using newer equipment and methods. The CICL comprises more than 10,000 years of evidence of changes to our climate in 1.4 kilometres of ice core samples.

Of the Logan expedition, Criscitiello says that it yielded data beyond what she’d hoped. “Every single scientific objective was ticked off,” Criscitiello told the National Geographic. “I think this was the highest-risk, highest-reward project that I’ve ever had the opportunity to lead.” The team extracted ice to a depth of 327 metres, which she says is likely the new record for oldest non-polar ice recovered in North America. It will provide researchers at the CICL with a trove of environmental data.