ANDRILL: Has it accomplished all it set out to achieve?

ANDRILL (ANtarctic geological DRILLing) is a multinational drilling project that is drilling into sediments under the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica. ANDRILL are looking at sediment cores to find evidence supporting the theory of past paleoclimatic changes in the Ross Ice Shelf area (and globally). Th...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: MacGilloway, Llara
Format: Other/Unknown Material
Language:English
Published: University of Canterbury 2013
Subjects:
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/10092/13879
Description
Summary:ANDRILL (ANtarctic geological DRILLing) is a multinational drilling project that is drilling into sediments under the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica. ANDRILL are looking at sediment cores to find evidence supporting the theory of past paleoclimatic changes in the Ross Ice Shelf area (and globally). This review evaluates the ANDRILL project to see if it has met its own conditions and to see if it has added to the geological and climatic knowledge of the Antarctic Region. ANDRILL has currently completed drilling in two sites (McMurdo Ice Shelf (MIS) Project and Southern McMurdo Sounds (SMS) Project) and has recovered 1285m of core material from the MIS project with sediments dating back to ~13 Ma, and another 1138m drill core from the SMS project with sediments dating back to ~20 Ma. Through analysis of these cores, ANDRILL has been able to locate each ice sheet retreat and advance in the vicinity of the drill sites over the past 20 million years. So far, there has been a lot of analysis on the sediment cores themselves, however there is a lack of correlation between these sediments and the dates they were deposited and how this relates to past and future climatic changes.