Mass2Ant at Lokeryggen Ice Rise

During December 2021 and January 2022, a team of four sceintists from the galciology department of the Universite Libre de Bruxelles and one field guide from the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica spent several weeks at the Lokeryggen Ice Rise on the   Coast in East Antarctica as part of the BELSPO-funded Mass2Ant project, which seeks to better understand the processes controlling the surface mass balance in East Antarctica, its variability over the last three centuries and, ultimately, improve model projections of surface mass balance changes of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet

During the 4t hand last season of the project, the resarchers collected a 26 km-long ground-penetrating radar transect going from east to west over the Lokeryggen Ice Rise to examine the variations in the surface mass balance of the ice rise from grounding line to grounding line. They also conducted radio echo sounding around the ice rise, did laser scans, and extracted shallow firn cores from the surface of the ice rise to get a rescord of snow accumulation during the last few years.