Staff Profile

Tas van Ommen
Principal Research Scientist - Glaciology

E-mail: tas.van.ommenATutas.edu.au

Postal address:

ACE CRC and Australian Government Antarctic Division,
Private Bag 80,
Hobart,
Tasmania 7001,
Australia

Phone:

+61-3-6226-2981

Fax:

+61-3-6226-2902

Research Overview

I work on the analysis of ice cores collected from Antarctica. I am based at the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems CRC and am employed by the Australian Government Antarctic Division, one of the partner agencies of the CRC. Within ACE CRC, I lead the Climate History Project: a component of the Climate Variability and Change Programme.

Ice cores provide proxy climate data reaching back many tens of thousands of years. My principal interests are in high-resolution climate studies of the last glacial cycle.

Our laboratory operates stable-isotope mass-spectrometry and ion chromatography facilities, and through collaboration with other labs also studies trapped air composition and cosmogenic isotopes.

Most of the cores we study are from the Law Dome region, near Australia's Casey station, at around 112 degrees E longitude. The summit of the Dome is approximately 110 km from the coast and has a very high rate of accumulation, which permits comparatively high resolution records to be extracted for the period since the last glacial maximum. The main "Dome Summit South" (DSS) ice core extends from the surface (elevation 1370m) to bedrock 1200m below, and has a climate signal that extends back over 80,000 years. In addition to the deep DSS core, we have a number of shallower records from the summit, and, to the east at DE08, where the accumulation rate is approximately double that at the summit. The DE08 cores have been used extensively in collaboration with colleagues at CSIRO to study past changes in atmospheric air composition, particularly greenhouse gases.

We also operate a project that uses Automatic Weather Station data from a facility at DSS in conjunction with high resolution snow-pit sampling to examine the connections with meteorology on short timescales. This work also permits investigation of the way in which depositional and post-depositional processes modify the ice-core signals.

Publications

A reasonably complete list of peer-reviewed papers is available in my collection of Online Reprints – where copyright permits, this includes downloadable PDFs.