Global warming, Antarctic ice is focus of multinational workshop

Map of Antarctica Click here for more information.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- As the national repository for geological material from the Southern Ocean, the Antarctic Marine Geology Research Facility at Florida State University houses the premier collection of Antarctic sediment cores -- and a hot new acquisition will offer an international team of scientists meeting there May 1-4 its best look yet at the impact of global warming on oceans worldwide.

The remarkable new core was extracted during the recent Antarctic summer from record-setting drilling depths 4,214 feet below the sea floor beneath Antarctica's Ross Ice Shelf, the Earth's largest floating ice body. Laced with sediment dating from the present day to about 10 million years ago, the core provides a geologic record of the ice shelf's history in unprecedented detail.

In fact, a polar research news feature in the March 2007 edition of the journal Nature called the sediment core "a frozen time capsule from Earth's icy past."

Greenish rock layered throughout the "time capsule" indicates periods of open-water conditions, suggesting that the Ross ice shelf retreated and advanced perhaps as many as 50 times over the last 5 million years in response to climate changes, says FSU AMGRF Head Curator Matthew Olney. He notes that signs of fluctuations such as these are critical because the Ross Sea ice is a floating extension of the even bigger West Antarctic Ice Sheet -- an area of the southernmost continent so unstable that scientists foresee its collapse in a world overheated by global warming.

Researchers from FSU's Antarctic Marine Geology Research Facility endure survival training on Antarctica's Ross Sea Ice Shelf. Click here for more information.

A collapse there could raise sea levels worldwide by a catastrophic 20 feet.

Credit for the core's record-setting extraction goes to the inaugural expedition of ANDRILL (ANtarctic geological DRILLing) -- a $30 million multinational project for which FSU is playing the key curatorial role. The collaborative research initiative is the most ambitious seafloor drilling effort ever undertaken at the Antarctic margins. The National Science Foundation's Office of Polar Programs largely funds both ANDRILL and the AMGRF at FSU.