Future Antarctic Margin Drilling: Developing a Science Program Plan for McMurdo Sound -- Report of a Workshop Oxford, UK April 5–7, 2001

• Main Authors: Harwood, David M, Lacy, Laura, Levy, Richard
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln 2002
• Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment; Arctic; Antarctic; Southern Ocean; The Antarctic; Ross Sea; McMurdo Sound; New Zealand; Webb; Hayes; Cape Roberts; Barrett; Harwood; Davey; McKelvey; Frakes; Antarc*; Antarctica; Ice Sheet; Ice Shelves; Sea ice
• Online Access: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/andrillrespub/3; https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/andrillrespub/article/1002/viewcontent/ANDRILL_Oxford_Workshop.pdf

ANDRILL (ANtarctic DRILLing) is a multinational initiative with the objectives to recover stratigraphic core records for use in interpreting Antarctica’s climatic, glacial and tectonic history over the past 50 million years and at varying scales of age resolution (0.1 to 100 thousand years [k.y.]). A key motivation of ANDRILL is that the role of the Antarctic cryosphere (ice sheets, ice shelves and sea-ice) in the global climate system is complex and poorly known. Understanding the past history of ice volume variation in Antarctica and associated physical changes in this region is critical to proper assessment of the global climate system and interaction of ice sheets with the ocean, atmosphere and biosphere. High-quality sedimentary archives of past ice sheet behavior have become available recently from the Cape Roberts Project (CRP) (Naish et al., 2001), unfortunately these are too few in number to allow a comprehensive understanding of Antarctica’s influence on global climate. Through the collection of geological data and their input into climate and ice sheet models, the ANDRILL Initiative will address this issue. ANDRILL proposes to drill a portfolio of sites—the McMurdo Sound Portfolio (MSP)—in order to recover critical intervals of Earth’s past climate history, where the dynamic behavior of ice sheets, ice shelves and sea-ice on Antarctica is thought to have influenced global ocean and atmospheric circulation and global sea-level elevation. In doing so, we acknowledge that efforts to understand the role of Antarctic drivers on global climate variability require a fundamental knowledge of Antarctic cryospheric evolution not only in recent times, which is plainly vital, but also for past times when global temperature and atmospheric CO2 were last similar to that which might well be reached by the end of this century. Limited exposures of Cenozoic strata in Antarctica (due to the ice cover), the low number of stratigraphic drillholes on the continental margin, and the short time that Antarctica has been ...