Vermonter Jacob Chalif is part of a dozen-member U.S. National Science Foundation project in Antarctica collecting the world’s oldest ice. Photo courtesy Jacob Chalif Many students on winter break hibernate at home amid the warmth of family and friends. But Vermonter Jacob Chalif has reason to instead fly 10,000 miles to drill down into the frozen barrens of Antarctica.“If you’re looking for ice,” he said this month, “there’s no better place to get it.”The 25-year-old Dartmouth College graduate student is part of a U.S. National Science Foundation project collecting some of the world’s oldest ice — dating back as many as a million years or more — in order to study climate change.Researchers can track current weather conditions using cutting-edge technology. But to dig into past millennia, they must excavate ancient ice and explore the air bubbles and particles encased inside, Chalif explained in a video call from a field camp 18 hours ahead of his home time zone in Woodstock.“Before about 1900, there’s really no way to know what our climate used to be like except by studying things like ice,” he said. “This is a way to fill in our gaps of what Earth’s climate used to be, how things like temperature and atmospheric circulation, wind patterns and carbon dioxide mix, and how we as people have impacted this delicate balance.”Chalif’s interest in such science sparked during his childhood in Long Island, where he learned a “glacial moraine” formed after ice that once covered the planet moved and melted to leave “all this sediment where I grew up.”Enrolling at Dartmouth, Chalif discovered the National Science Foundation’s Center for Oldest Ice Exploration (or COLDEX), which has gathered more than a dozen higher education institutions — from his school to as far west as the University of Washington — to advance polar study.Jacob Chalif, a 25-year-old Dartmouth College graduate student from Woodstock, has spent the winter in Antarctica. Photo courtesy Jacob Chalif Earning a place through a competitive selection process, Chalif boarded a plane in Boston this past November and flew to San Francisco, then New Zealand and finally, some 36 hours of flight time later, Antarctica.The Vermonter was one of a dozen researchers who then traveled from the McMurdo Station, the largest year-round U.S. outpost, to set up a camp of tents, thermal sleeping bags and drilling gear in the Allan Hills blue ice area some 135 miles away.Antarctica, 1.5 times the size of the United States and covered almost entirely by mile-thick ice, has no permanent population but instead a global group of up to 5,000 rotating scientific research staffers, according to estimates. Most travelers visit during the peak “summer” months of December and January, which feature 24-hour sunlight (“you pull a hat over your face and say goodnight,” Chalif said of bedtime) and the year’s warmest temperatures.“It’s balmy,” he said. “It’s negative 20 degrees Fahrenheit pretty much every day.”Researchers visiting Antarctica for the U.S. National Science Foundation collect ice dating back as many as a million years or more. Photo courtesy Jacob Chalif With calm weather, Chalif and his colleagues have harvested more than 10,000 pounds of ice for transport back to labs in the United States. During occasional blizzards that can last for days, as well as on such holidays as Thanksgiving, Christmas and the eight nights of Hanukkah, they found refuge in their camp’s two heated communal tents.“The temperature alone you can manage, but the thing that makes it so difficult are the really high winds,” he said. “We’re talking like 20 to 40 miles an hour. They kind of pluck everything out of you. But there’s something about being here that is critical to the science. You’re able to see how this all fits together.”Chalif’s academic research focuses on pollution in ice. He and Dartmouth associate professor Erich Osterberg led a recent study that found evidence of fossil-fuel emissions reaching samples in Alaska and Greenland in amounts large enough to alter their atmospheric chemistry.“The fact that these remote areas of the Arctic see these undeniable human imprints shows that there’s literally no corner of this planet we haven’t touched,” Chalif said upon the report’s release.Vermonter Jacob Chalif is part of a dozen-member U.S. National Science Foundation project in Antarctica collecting the world’s oldest ice. Photo courtesy Jacob Chalif Chalif is set to return to Dartmouth in February to complete the last year and a half of his master’s program. He hopes to work with the ice he has collected, as well as gain more home-grown survival skills.“I did not expect two months in to still have a smile on my face,” he said from the field. “But there’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing or bad gear. I’ve added a few layers here, but I had this natural instinct for how to handle it. The skills you get from spending winters in Vermont have been indispensable.”Read the story on VTDigger here: Winter in Florida? This Vermonter has reason to travel farther south — to Antarctica.