An ice core on Müller Ice CapDr. Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, University of ManitobaWe, a group of scientists from the University of Manitoba, plan to drill an ice core through Müller Ice Cap on Axel Heiberg Island. This core will be 10 cm in diameter and ~600 m long and will contain information about climate in Arctic Canada thousands of years ago. This core will help answer: • Did sea ice conditions respond to climate during the past 20,000 years? • What climatic conditions did arctic ice caps experience during the past and how did they respond? • How old is Müller Ice Cap? • How fast is Müller Ice Cap shrinking, and how much is climate warming there?We can use new measurement techniques to address these questions before warming melts the records in the ice cap.The project involves going to Axel Heiberg Island twice, once to pick the exact site of the core and once to drill. In 2023, we plan to have a team of five survey the ice cap with an ice-penetrating radar and collect some small snow samples. The radar does not affect people or animals but will identify the drill site that contains the most information about past climate. We also plan to fly 6 hours of surveys from Resolute Bay, with one aircraft more than 1200 ft above the ice. This will use human- and animal-safe radar and lasers to determine the ice thickness at inaccessible parts of Müller Ice Cap. In 2024, about 12 people will spend 2-3 months camping on the glacier, drilling the core, and making measurements on the surrounding snow. The core will be sent back to laboratories to determine past temperature, snowfall and sea-ice conditions in the area. The measurements will inform models of the past, present, and future evolution of Müller Ice Cap.The ice and snow we collect will have minimal environmental impact; in total, we plan to collect less than 10 m3, and additional snow melted for camp use will be less than 1 m3 per day. The primary environmental impact will be that we must put a non-freezing fluid in the hole so that it does not close around the drill. We plan to leave the fluid in the hole afterwards to allow future measurements of the ice flow and temperature (and since it is difficult to remove), as is done in Greenland and Antarctica. The fluid will be safely contained in the ice cap and is non-hazardous. In addition, the location of the work is over 400 km from Grise Fiord or Resolute, and will be in the centre of the glacier, far from wildlife.Data will be made available through the Canadian Watershed Information Network (CanWIN), a permanent online archive. An archive of the ice itself will be kept at the Canadian Ice Core Laboratory for future use. The results will be shared through consultations in Grise Fiord and Resolute, where data from the deep past can be integrated with knowledge from the communities. We hope these results can guide future community-led research on glaciers closer to the communities, and we have applied for funding from CFI to help make that possible (evaluation in June 2023). During 2024 we hope to employ 1-2 residents of Resolute or Grise Fiord for work on the ice cap—this could involve logistics, camp management, or cooking.