While one Cook County resident ascends the top of the world by climbing Mount Denali (Lonnie Dupre), a former Cook County resident works at the bottom of the world in Antarctica.
Both, it seems, can’t get enough of cold weather.
Cook County High School (CCHS) graduate Jeff Vervoort is currently working in Antarctica on a geology project with University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD) professor John Goodge.
Vervoort graduated from CCHS in 1972. He is currently an associate professor in radiogenic isotope geochemistry at Washington State University.
While Vervoort has spent many summers in Alaska, traveled throughout the mountains of the western United States, and spent time on various continents, he said, “Nothing matches the scale of what you see in Antarctica. This is an awe inspiring place.”
Goodge and Vervoort have worked together the past couple of years, but this is the first time Vervoort has traveled to Antarctica. He did so in response to an invitation by Goodge.
“The scale and extremes of Antarctica provide enormous challenges to scientific research (in our case ‘doing geology’) down here. First, a vast majority of the continent—and all of the older parts of Antarctica we are trying to understand— is covered by immense ice sheets and is inaccessible to direct sampling. Second, our field sites are hundreds of miles from the nearest fixed base. All access from McMurdo is by helicopter, plane or (when at one of our remote sites) snowmobile.
“This requires enormous infrastructure to enable us to get to get to our remote caps and to move us to the different locations where we will do our research. And third, once in the field the extreme environmental conditions make doing hands-on work challenging, to say the least,” wrote Vervoort in his blog, found on the New York Times Science website.
At the heart of their work, Goodge and Vervoort are sampling rocks and glacial deposits to help build a better picture of the continent beneath the polar ice cap. But it’s not just any rocks that interest them. Vervoort and Goodge are looking for old rocks, rocks pushed up from the bottom of the ice that show what happened on the continent before the ice came.
“Our approach in addressing the first challenge—trying to understand what is buried under thousands of feet of ice at the core of the Antarctic continent—is to sample rocks eroded and carried along by the enormous ice sheets that cover a majority of it.
“These ice sheets flow into, around and over the peaks of the Transantarctic Mountains on their way to the sea. Where they do so, there are places where loss of ice from the glaciers (mostly sublimation enabled by abundant sunshine and persistent winds coming off the polar plateau) outpaces growth on new ice.
“In places where this process is extreme, the rocks carried by the glaciers may be exposed at the surface in bare ‘blue ice’ or left in glacial deposits known as moraines.
“The challenge is to find areas where, first, this process occurs, and second, where the long-carried glacial material can be distinguished from the material derived locally from the rocks of the Transantarctic mountains.
“In this way our job is similar to that of the groups that each year scour the blue ice near the edge of the polar plateau looking for meteorites. But instead of looking for material that has landed on top of the ice cap and been carried for great distances, we are looking for material sourced from below, scoured by the base of the ice sheet.”
Vervoort and Goodge will spend five weeks in Antarctica.
Vervoort graduated from the University of Wisconsin at Madison with an undergraduate degree in English. He completed his PhD work in geology at the Madison campus and has since become one of the leading experts in the world in his field of isotopic geochemistry. His parents still reside in Grand Marais.
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