NIU will help spearhead Antarctic drilling project

The National Science Foundation has awarded a $12.9 million Antarctic research grant to a consortium of five U.S. universities headed by NIU and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

The grant supports an ambitious international effort to probe deeper than ever before into geological strata buried beneath the frozen sea to help scientists better understand contemporary global warming trends.

Dubbed ANDRILL, for Antarctic geological drilling, the project will be a focal point during International Polar Year (2007-09), a worldwide campaign of polar education and analyses.

“The Antarctic is like a global thermostat,” explained NIU geologist Ross Powell, who serves as a co-chief scientist for ANDRILL. “The region is showing it can be extremely sensitive to climate change with the massive ice sheet interacting with the world's atmosphere and oceans to help maintain the world's current temperature distribution. When global temperatures warm past critical thresholds, the ice sheet melts, accelerating the warming effect. When global temperatures cool, the ice sheet expands, accelerating the cooling effect.”

The NSF grant, to be dispersed over five years, will be administered by the ANDRILL Science Management Office, headquartered at UNL. In all, ANDRILL is backed by more than $30 million in funding, including $9.7 million in previous and ongoing national agreements to support operations and nearly $8 million from the other countries to support scientific research.

In addition to NIU and UNL, other U.S. universities making up the American half of the ANDRILL program are Florida State University in Tallahassee, Ohio State University in Columbus and the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. The international half will include scientists from New Zealand, Italy and Germany.

In October and November of 2006 and 2007, ANDRILL scientists will use a powerful new drilling system partially owned by UNL and NIU to recover rock cores from the seabed in the McMurdo Sound area of the Ross Sea, using floating ice as a drilling platform. By studying the cores, scientists in Antarctica and around the world will be able to develop a detailed history of the Antarctic climate and the expansion and contraction of the area's ice sheets over the past 20 million years.

“The core samples that we retrieve will provide a layered sedimentary record that scientists can read like a history book to infer past glacial and climatic changes, because the samples contain fossils and sediment left behind during repeated advances and retreats of the ice sheet,” Powell said. “While our focus is the past 20 million years, eventually we hope this program may be able to tap into a geological record of time as far back as 50 to 60 million years – when few, if any, glaciers existed and the planet had just experienced the age of dinosaurs.”

“A team of 100 international scientists will work to establish how fast, how frequent, and how large were the past changes in the Antarctic ice sheet,” added UNL micropaleontologist David Harwood, director of the ANDRILL Science Management Office and co-chief scientist with Powell. “The past will reveal much about the future and Antarctica 's role in the global climate machine, which affects all of us.”

ANDRILL's Science Management Office opened at UNL in 2002, soon after the completion of its predecessor, the Cape Roberts Project (1995-2000), in the western Ross Sea region. Also in 2002, Harwood and Powell secured a $1 million Major Research Initiative grant from NSF to help build the drilling system, which is nearing completion in Christchurch, New Zealand. It will be tested there this fall.

ANDRILL will award sub-grants to some 40 scientists, or 20 in each of the two drilling seasons. Half will work in Antarctica and the other half will work in laboratories at their home institutions. Powell said it is “highly likely” that other NIU scientists and students will be involved in the project. Geology's Reed Scherer is already on the scientific steering committee for the U.S. ANDRILL program.

The program will proceed in three stages. Seismic surveys to determine the best drilling sites will be completed in October and November.

In 2006, a team led by Powell and Tim Naish of the Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences in New Zealand will drill from the McMurdo Ice Shelf south of Ross Island. In the second drilling season, a team led by Harwood and Fabio Florindo of Italy's National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology will drill from a site west of Ross Island.

Scientists selected the McMurdo Sound region for the project because the area provides access to a full range of geologic activity. ANDRILL's drilling system, developed and operated by Antarctica New Zealand (the project operator for ANDRILL), is designed to punch through about 275 meters of ice, drop through 900 meters of water to the sea floor and pull a continuous 1,000-meter-long sediment core at each drilling site.

The core samples first will be examined by scientists at McMurdo Station and then stored at Florida State University's Antarctic Research Facility, where they will be available for study.

ANDRILL also has a strong education and outreach component as six educators will work in Antarctica during each drilling season, learning how to incorporate the basic science of ANDRILL into their curricula and to share it with other teachers. Those positions will also be determined in a competitive application procedure through theANDRILL Science Management Office. The outreach will also extend to the general public through a planned television documentary produced in Antarctica and the United States by NET Nebraska, the Nebraska public television network.

With an area of 5.4 million square miles (more than 50 percent larger than the area of the United States ), Antarctica is surrounded by a frozen ocean and is almost totally covered by ice that is more than 15,000 feet thick in places. The polar climate there has existed for only 3 million years, however, and through most of its history, the continent has been ice-free.

Today the ice cap accounts for some 90 percent of the world's freshwater. If it were to entirely melt, it would raise the level of the world's oceans by nearly 200 feet.

No one expects a catastrophe of that magnitude to happen in the foreseeable future.

However, there is concern about the future of the western portion of the Antarctic ice sheet, which is grounded well below sea level and is considered unstable. Collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet would raise global sea levels by about 20 feet, and NIU's Scherer previously has shown that this portion of the ice sheet collapsed in the recent geologic past.

With some climate models projecting a greenhouse warming of the Earth's atmosphere of roughly 10 degrees Fahrenheit in this century, scientists are trying to learn how the Antarctic ice sheet might respond.

“Abrupt climate changes, which in scientific terms would occur over decades or less, could provide significant problems for humanity, impacting such things as agriculture, air quality, energy usage, the spread of disease and the viability of coastal communities,” Powell said. “We are hoping we may recover sediments representing periods of time when such rapid changes have occurred in the past, and that's another reason why this research is so important. By looking at the Antarctic past, we're glimpsing the Earth's future.”

8-15-05