Success story: 18 July 08
Secrets from the Ice
The multinational Antarctic Drilling Programme (ANDRILL) project is giving the international scientific community its first comprehensive picture of how Antarctic ice shelves and ice sheets behaved during past periods of natural global warming.
Foundation? investment in ANDRILL and the research underpinning it will total NZ$6.4 million by 2010 and includes support for scientists at GNS Science and work ca
rried out at Victoria and Otago universities. There is keen international interest in ANDRILL, which has become the most successful Antarctic drilling programme to date in terms of depth and rock core samples. These have been recovered from beneath the Antarctic ice shelf over the past two years. ANDRILL’S on-ice operations are managed by Antarctica? New Zealand on behalf of the partner nations supporting the project – Germany, Italy, New Zealand and the United States.
Widely anticipated initial results from analysing the samples are being published this year and Professor Tim Naish, who leads ANDRILL, says they provide the first direct evidence of periods in the last five million years when the Ross Sea was several degrees warmer, the ice shelf had melted, and the West Antarctica Ice Sheet may have disappeared.
“The results show that there have been major fluctuations in the ice sheets during past warm periods. The difference is that they resulted from natural causes and at a time when greenhouse gas levels were at pre Industrial Revolution levels.”
ANDRILL has been an outstanding technical success, setting a new record by extracting a core sample 1.28 kilometres long. Access through the Ross Ice Shelf is gained through a hot-water drill system invented by Victoria University’s Alex Pyne and developed with Porirua company Webster Drilling and Exploration. The rig has to operate in temperatures as low as 30 degrees below zero and deal with an ice shelf that is continually rising and falling with the tides.
Professor Naish says understanding how Antarctica will respond to future global climate change is critical given Antarctica’s role as a driver of ocean circulation and global sea level.
Note: This success story is one of the features in our 2006/07 Statement of Investment Outcomes?. Read the full report.
Picture: Antartica New Zealand Pictorial Collection.