Greenland Ice Sheet Project

The Greenland Ice Sheet Project ( GISP ) was a drilling program for the extraction of ice cores and paleoclimate data contained therein from the Greenland ice sheet. It was developed by the U.S. National Science Foundation ( NSF) and was one of the biggest scientific projects in the late 1970s and 1980s the NSF. GISP ran for a period of more than ten years. The scientists involved were from Denmark, Switzerland and the United States of America. In addition to the NSF, the project by the Swiss National Fund for Scientific Research and the Danish Commission for Scientific Investigations in Greenland ( Danish commissions for Videnskabelige Undersøgelser i Grønland ) was co-financed.

The GISP field work started in 1971 with Dye 3 This 372 -meter-long core sample had a thickness of 10.2 cm. Thereafter, annual field expeditions were undertaken. Thus, cores were recovered from the middle depths of different points of the ice sheet. The first hole revealed a core of 392 m length with Milcent, and another a core of 405 m length in 1974 in the vicinity of Crete station. Logistical and technical problems led to the development of a better derrick. In the summer of 1979 began a bore, which should lead to the rock base of the Dye 3. In the first year, a hole was drilled with a diameter of 18 cm, and stripped to a depth of 80 m. The core drilling was continued through two seasons; on August 10, 1981, the bedrock was reached at a depth of 2037 m.

The data collected by GISP have contributed to a large gain in knowledge regarding the history of the Greenland ice sheet and climate history of the earth. They have shown the importance that involve the conserved ice sheets in climate data. For example, the researchers found that there were violent climatic fluctuations during the last glaciation in Greenland, so-called Dansgaard - Oeschger events. Likewise, traces of the Heinrich events were found.

GISP2

In 1989 GISP2 ice cores began with a length of 3000 m should provide climate data for the past 200,000 years.

GISP2 was funded by the United States National Science Foundation 's Division of Polar Programs as part of the Arctic System Science Initiative ( ARCSS ). At the GISP2 project scientist of the following institutions were involved:

• United States Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory in Hanover, New Hampshire
• Desert Research Institute of the Carnegie Mellon University in Reno, Nevada
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Ohio State University
• Pennsylvania State University
• New York State Department of Health
• Lamont - Doherty Geological Observatory of Columbia University
• University of Arizona
• University of Colorado
• University of Miami
• University of New Hampshire
• University of Rhode Iceland
• University of Washington
• United States Geological Survey in Tacoma, Washington
• University of Wisconsin