How will the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) behave as our Earth continues to warm? That is what a large international team of scientists, including Utrecht-based earth scientist Francesca Sangiorgi , will investigate in the SWAIS2C project. This fall, the first cores will be drilled in the country under the WAIS. These drill cores contain information that may be essential to our future, but have been impossible to obtain until now. They serve as a timeline of past climate, up to 3 million years ago. By reconstructing warmer periods in as much detail as possible, predictions for the WAIS, and thus our warming planet, become more accurate. "And that’s essential, because the WAIS contains enough ice to raise sea levels by 4 meters," Sangiorgi said.
West Antarctica is melting fast, making it one of the most sensitive places to climate change worldwide. To understand more about Antarctica’s contribution to sea level rise, an engineering team will be drilling up to 200 m deep this fall near the southeastern edge of the Ross Ice Shelf. This will collect geological data from changing sediments that reflect climate conditions at the time they were formed. The hope is that this data will provide important insights into the past of West Antarctica and the future of Earth.
Because we still know so little about the behavior of the WAIS under warmer conditions, and the ice sheet contains enough ice for a sea level rise of up to 4 meters, we are very concerned
Small aquatic organisms
Francesca Sangiorgi is one of the researchers contributing to this project with her unique expertise. She has extensive experience in researching fossils of small planktonic organisms. "These microalgae that lived in ocean water say a lot about the climate of the time," she says. "It says something about the temperature of the water, the melting of the ice, how much area of the sea was covered with ice then, things like that." Because the site has not been drilled before, the exact period being investigated is still uncertain, "but we think the last 2 to 3 million years. There were periods then (superinterglacials) that were as warm, or even warmer, than we expect it to be at the end of this century. Because we still know so little about the behavior of the WAIS under warmer conditions, and the ice sheet contains enough ice for a sea level rise of up to 4 meters, we are very concerned."
Not without risk
It has not previously been possible to collect drill cores under the WAIS because the ice sheet covering the sea surface does not provide a stable surface for the drilling equipment. "Our approach to drilling is new and not without risk, but it is the only way we can take these critical samples. If we succeed and can prove that this new drilling system works, it opens up new opportunities to collect important data on climate change and ice sheet dynamics at other remote locations in Antarctica," said Richard Levy, co-principal scientist of the SWAIS2C project.
More than 120 people from about 35 international research organizations are collaborating on the SWAIS2C project. SWAIS2C brings together researchers from New Zealand, the Netherlands, the United States, Germany, Australia, Italy, Japan, Spain, the Republic of Korea, and the United Kingdom. Calling SWAIS2C the discovery for our lifetime, the research team hopes the results will guide plans to adapt to inevitable sea level rise while reinforcing the need to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions.
