Dispatches from the Field, a new digital program designed to bring The Explorers Club community closer—wherever you are.
Each session kicks off with a 10-minute talk from a Featured Speaker, streamed live to the public on explorers.org and our YouTube channel.
This will be followed by Campfire sessions—intimate, Members-Only breakout groups where you can connect, share ideas, and build relationships.
This edition features Alison Criscitiello, EC50 2025, to present Drilling the Longest Ice Core in Canadian History: Axel Heiberg Island
In April and May of 2025, a team of Canadian and Danish scientists co-led by Dr. Alison Criscitiello drilled the deepest ice core in all of the Americas, on Axel Heiberg Island in the Canadian high Arctic. It is likely to contain a 10-20,000 year record of Arctic climate variability. Due to its location on the edge of the Arctic Ocean, this ice cap may hold critical information about sea ice and Arctic Ocean variability in the past. Alison and team also drilled four 70m deep cores; these cores will date back to ~1870, and will be used to look at the atmospheric transport of various environmental contaminants to the North. Get a quick glimpse into the complex logistics and big science that Alison and her team just pulled off!
Members only – click here to register.
Alison Criscitiello
Dr. Alison Criscitiello is an ice core scientist and high-altitude mountaineer. She is an Assistant Professor and the Director of the Canadian Ice Core Lab at University of Alberta, and co-founder of Girls on Ice Canada. Criscitiello explores the history of climate and sea ice in polar and high-alpine regions using ice core chemistry. This involves long months of living in a tent and drilling ice cores in places like Antarctica, Alaska, and the Canadian high Arctic. Criscitiello’s work also focuses on environmental contaminant histories in ice cores from the Canadian high Arctic and the water towers of the Canadian Rockies. She has earned the Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee Medal, three American Alpine Club (AAC) climbing awards, the John Lauchlan and Mugs Stump alpine climbing awards, and the first PhD in glaciology ever conferred by MIT.
