Rationale for future Antarctic and Southern Ocean drilling

• Main Authors: DeSantis, Laura, Gohl, Karsten, Larter, Robert D., Escutia, C., Ikehara, M., Hong, Jongkuk, Naish, T., Barrett, P., Rack, F., Wellner, J. S.
• Format: Conference Object
• Language: unknown
• Published: 2013
• Subjects: Antarc*; Antarctic; Antarctica; ice core; Ice Sheet; Ross Sea; Southern Ocean
• Online Access: https://epic.awi.de/id/eprint/32211/; https://hdl.handle.net/10013/epic.40848

Valuable insights into future sensitivity of the Antarctic cryosphere to atmospheric and oceanic warming can be gained from the geologic record of past climatic warm intervals. Continental to deep ocean sediments provide records of contemporaneous changes in ice sheet extent and oceanographic conditions that extend back in time, including periods with atmospheric CO2 levels and temperatures similar to those likely to be reached in the next 100 years. The Circum-Antarctic region is under-sampled respect to scientific ocean drilling. However, recovery from glacially-influenced, continental shelf and rise sediments (expeditions ODP178, 188 and IODP 318), provided excellent records of Cenozoic climate and ice sheet evolution. The ANtarctic DRILLing program achieved >98% recovery on the Ross Sea shelf with a stable platform on fast ice with riser drilling technology. Newer technologies, such as the MeBo shallow drilling rig will further improve Antarctic margin drilling. Drilling around Antarctica in the past decades revealed cooling and regional ice growth during the Cenozoic, coupled with paleogeographic, CO2 atmosphere concentration and global temperature changes. Substantial progress has been made in dating sediments and in the interpretation of paleoclimate/paleoenvironmental proxies in Antarctic margin sediments (e.g. orbital scale variations in Antarctica’s cryosphere during the Miocene and Pliocene). Holocene ultra-high resolution shelf sections recently recovered can be correlated to the ice core record, to detect local mechanisms versus inter-hemispheric connections. While the potential for reconstructing past ice sheet history has been demonstrated through a careful integration of geological and geophysical data with numerical ice sheet modelling, uncertainties remain high due to the sparse geographic distribution of the records and the regional variability in the ice sheet’s response. Projects developed using a multi-leg, multi-platform approach (e.g. latitudinal and/or depth transects involving a ...