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BUFFALO, N.Y. — Much like the ice he helped preserve for decades, Chester “Chet” Langway’s legacy at the ÃÛÌÒ´«Ã½ endures.

Faculty here are still studying the ancient sediments that Langway’s team pulled from nearly a mile below the Greenland ice sheet sixty years ago. They’re also leading their own ice drilling expeditions at sites not far from where Langway and his team drilled.

“Chet was a pioneer. He and his colleagues were really the first scientists to realize that you can extract information about Earth’s past climate from ice cores,” says Jason Briner, PhD, associate chair and professor in the Department of Earth Sciences. “We may have technology and approaches that he didn’t, but we’re definitely operating in Chet’s realm.”

Langway, a professor emeritus and longtime chair of what was then the Department of Geology, died last month at his home in Massachusetts at the age of 95.

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which inducted Langway in 2011, credits him for launching the era of deep ice core drilling programs. He participated in over 30 expeditions to Greenland and Antarctica and, for over three decades, held in his possession almost every ice core drilled from the two ice sheets.

His stewardship of the ice included his time directing the Central Ice Core Storage Facility and Information Exchange at UB from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s. It was the nation’s leading ice core laboratory and funded for 16 years by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

“UB goes down in history as being associated with ice core science, thanks to Chet Langway,” says Elizabeth Thomas, PhD, associate professor of earth sciences. 

Langway was one of the few glaciologists who had the foresight to preserve ice cores, understanding the stories they could tell about climate change and human history.

A book published last year about Langway’s ice cores, “When the Ice is Gone,” quotes former NSF program manager Guy Guthridge as saying, “Chet basically was the savior of ice cores when few were interested.”

Perhaps the most significant ice core that Langway preserved was the one he helped drill in Greenland during his career with the U.S. Army Corp. of Engineers. 

The Camp Century military base was the site of a failed effort to hide nuclear missiles under the Greenland ice sheet, but Langway and the science team there did succeed at drilling a 4,560-foot-deep ice core in 1966. 

The world’s first complete deep ice core, it kicked off studies of the Earth’s ancient climate.

“Before the Camp Century ice core, we had some idea of climate change, including from ocean records, but we had no idea if that was expressed on land in some consistent way,” Thomas says. “It was revolutionary that the ice core’s isotopes revealed a cycle of warm and cold periods in the past.”

It also told scientists plenty about the climate change happening since the Industrial Revolution. 

“It's because of ice cores that we know that today’s CO2 levels in the atmosphere are off the charts and can attribute today's climate changes to human causes,” Briner says.

The 11 feet of sediment collected from below the bottom of the ice core would reveal the vulnerability of the Greenland ice sheet, although only after it was nearly forgotten. 

The ice core, and its sediment, came with Langway when he joined UB as chair of the geology department in 1975 and remained in the university’s storage facility until the mid-90s, when a retiring Langway sent it to colleagues at the ÃÛÌÒ´«Ã½ of Copenhagen. There, the sediment was unopened and largely forgotten until a serendipitous freezer cleanout in 2018. 

An NSF-funded team, including UB and led by the ÃÛÌÒ´«Ã½ of Vermont, determined the last time the sediment was exposed to sunlight. Their finding suggests that the Greenland ice sheet was smaller approximately 400,000 years ago, when carbon dioxide levels were much lower than they are today. 

“This tells us that the ice sheet will melt again and raise sea levels if global warming continues apace,” says Thomas, who co-authored the study.

Thomas is also involved in researching the sediment from beneath the Camp Century ice core. Just this past week, she presented findings on the sediment’s organic molecules during the fourth annual U.S. Ice Core Community meeting in Minneapolis.

However, she noted she is not an ice core scientist.

“I work with mud, mostly from the bottoms of lakes and the ocean, but was invited to do this analysis, I think in part, because of UB and Chet’s legacy with these samples,” she says. 

Briner is also not an ice core scientist — he studies glaciers and the rocks and landforms they leave behind — but believes he is often mistaken for one, due to Langway.

“When I go to Greenland to study, people associate UB with ice cores and say, ‘You must be one of those ice core scientists,’” he says.

In recent years, Briner has dipped his toes into ice cores. He’s the co-lead of the NSF-funded GreenDrill project, which aims to collect samples of bedrock from beneath the Greenland ice sheet.

The similarity to Langway’s work isn’t lost on him. 

“We’re strategically selecting the best places to drill, but Chet and the Camp Century team really had no say in where they drilled,” he says. “It’s kind of remarkable that this somewhat random spot sample created the whole field of ice core science and has been so instrumental to climate research.”