Active layer apparent thermal diffusivity and its dependence on atmospheric

• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Antarctic; Livingston Island; Antarc*; Antarctica
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.498.9174; http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2007/1047/ea/of2007-1047ea210.pdf

Summary Antarctica is one of the most sensitive areas in the world to global climate change making it a privileged observatory for the study of this change. Nevertheless, its geographic location and its extreme climate make it very difficult to collect a continuous series of measurements. These adverse factors can be circumvented using boreholes since ground temperature measurements are a reliable and adequate method of detecting climatic trends. Since January 2000, our team has monitored the evolution of the active layer with a 2.4 m deep borehole called Incinerador. It is located near the Spanish Antarctic Base on Livingston Island (62º39’S, 60º21’W) in the Maritime Antarctic. In this paper, the apparent thermal diffusivity has been estimated in Incinerador observing a seasonal dependence. Moreover, the evolution of the temperature signal in the active layer shows two different periodic behaviours, a one-day period in the summer and a 6-to-10-day period in the winter.