Antarctica: Looking through the Ice into the Past A collaboration with COLDEX scientists, Duncan Young and Shivangini Singh, UTIG, UT Austin. Their work focuses on studying the structure of the ice below the surface, revealing how it has flowed, deformed, and interacted with the landscape hidden underneath over millions of years. One of their primary goals is to locate regions where the oldest continuous ice has remained preserved. To support this mission, TACC’s visualization team reviewed the data and visualizations collected by the scientists and printed them as a 3D model. Viemo Video Seeking Antarctica’s oldest ice is about far more than recovering an ancient climate record – it is about understanding how the Antarctic Ice Sheet has evolved and how it may respond to future climate change. As part of the NSF Center for Oldest Ice Exploration (COLDEX), Dr. Duncan Young and colleagues use airborne ice-penetrating radar, gravity, and magnetic surveys to image the internal structure of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet and the geology hidden beneath more than three kilometers of ice. Their work spans three key regions of East Antarctica — the South Pole Station area surveying toward Dome A, the Allan Hills, and Dome C — each offering a different piece of the puzzle in the search for ancient ice. These measurements reveal how ice has flowed, deformed, melted, and interacted with the underlying landscapes over millions of years. L1, L5, L7, Basal Bedrock The primary goal is to locate regions where the oldest continuous ice – some more than 1.5 million years old – has remained preserved. Such ice could provide an unprecedented record of Earth’s atmosphere before the Mid-Pleistocene transition, when glacial cycles shifted from 40,000- to 100,000-year rhythms. Finding these archives requires identifying places where the ice has experienced minimal deformation and little or no melting at its base. Radar imaging of internal ice layers, together with models of ice flow and basal temperature, allows researchers to determine where these conditions are most likely to exist. Bedrock and Basal layer ~ topological lines Volume of each individual layer Recent work by Young and collaborators has revealed that the deepest ice layers interact closely with Antarctica’s hidden geology. Their survey discovered evidence that slowly moving basal ice transports sediment into deep subglacial basins, while localized geothermal heat influences where melting occurs beneath the ice sheet. This tells researchers that what’s happening beneath the ice — the rock below and the heat it gives off — has a big impact on whether the ice sheet stays stable and whether its ancient climate secrets survive. By mapping these hidden processes, COLDEX is identifying the best drilling targets while improving our understanding of how Antarctica has changed through time – and how it may respond to a warming world. After reviewing the data and visualizations, the data was printed out in the form of a 3D model, bringing the science team’s findings into a physical shape you can see and hold. “We assemble this dataset from individual radar profiles, which we integrate into a 3D view of the data, and then from that 3D view, we can choose where we want to go to test hypotheses as to what processes are happening in the entire Antarctic ice sheet.” – Duncan A. Young Process This video artifact was created from geophysical data collected through the NSF Center for Oldest Ice Exploration (COLDEX). The primary source material consists of airborne ice-penetrating radar observations acquired during research flights over Antarctica. The scientific visualization workflow was carried out with ParaView on Lonestar6, a high-performance computing system operated by the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). The isochron layers were represented as three-dimensional surfaces and rendered in ParaView. Volumetric components of the visualization were rendered with OSPRay. OSPRay. Surface rendering is interactive, and the volume rendering takes 40 minutes on a Lonestar6 CPU node with 128 cores. A physical model was also produced from the three-dimensional visualization. The 3D printing was carried out by the TACC Visualization Laboratory using Raise printers. (printer models, slicing software)The final video combines the ParaView and OSPRay renderings, views of the 3D-printed model, narration, and edited visual transitions. (video composition) Claude Code and Claude Code Opus 5 were used to develop the codebase for transforming original data into ParaView format and debugging the OSPRay renderer and preview UI. No Generative AI was used in the process of data handling, data visualization, or 3D model creation
