Borehole Thermometry Measurements to reconstruct the warming of the last century of the East Antarctic Plateau

The Antarctic ice represents the greatest potential source of global sea-level rise, and its response to climate change introduces significant uncertainty in future projections. Understanding recent climatic trends in East Antarctica is challenging due to a limited instrumental record. Additionally, paleoclimatic information from ice cores hasn't been able to resolve recent temperature changes on the Antarctic Plateau, mainly because of noise affecting the high-resolution climate signal and uncertainties in the transfer function between climate and ice-core records. Complementary to the information derived from ice cores, the temperature distribution through the ice sheet also provides a record of past climate changes. This allows the reconstruction of the past surface temperature history based on the vertical temperature profile obtained from boreholes. On the East Antarctic Plateau, shallow (200m) boreholes measured with an accuracy of <10mK should allow the reconstruction of the temperature evolution of the last century, and thus enable a better determination of Antarctic climate sensitivity. Here, we present our measurement setup as well as the first results from the field season of 2023/24, measuring the borehole temperature at the EPICA Dronning Maud Land Drilling Site (Kohnen Station).