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from the issue of August 18, 2005
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UNL takes lead in Antarctica drilling project
BY TOM SIMONS, UNIVERSITY COMMUNICATIONS
A $12.9 million grant will be sending UNL researchers and students south for the winter.
However, the Husker snowbirds - led by UNL's David Harwood and Richard Levy - will be bundling up as they join an international effort in to probe geological strata buried beneath a frozen sea in Antarctica.
Using a specially designed drilling rig, partially owned by UNL, a consortium of five U.S. universities and scientists from New Zealand, Italy and Germany will probe deeper than ever before, collecting core samples in order to help scientists better understand global warming trends.
Dubbed ANDRILL - short for ANarctic geological DRILLing - the project will be a focal point during International Polar Year (2007-09), a worldwide campaign of polar education and analyses.
| | UNL researchers David Harwood (left) and Richard Levy will play key roles in the international drilling effort in Antarctica. Photo by Brett Hampton/IANR.
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"Rather than finding solutions and answers to Antarctica's role in global climate change, this research will help us to define what questions we should be asking," said Harwood during the Aug. 9 announcement. "The information we gather will lead to the next generation of geological researchers."
Awarded by the National Science Foundation, the grant will be dispersed over five years and administered by the ANDRILL Science Management Office, headquartered at UNL and led by Harwood. 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.
UNL and Northern Illinois University in Dekalb have taken the project lead. Joined by the international scientists, the consortium includes Florida State University in Tallahassee, Ohio State University in Columbus and the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.
In October and November of 2006 and 2007, ANDRILL scientists will use the powerful new drilling system 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.
"Drilling for a sedimentary history of climate change adjacent to the Earth's largest ice sheet will reveal a lot about how the Antarctic region responded in the past, and may respond in the future, to climate perturbations like global warming," Harwood said.
ANDRILL's Science Manage-ment 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 NIU geologist Ross Powell secured a $1 million NSF grant from to help build the drilling system.
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.
In addition to its extensive science and operations aspects, 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. The outreach will also extend to the general public through a planned television documentary produced in Antarctica and the United States by NET Nebraska.
But the core element of ANDRILL is scientific research and the knowledge it will produce.
"We don't have a good reference for the last 20 million years of time in Antarctica, and that's a time period that is critical to our understanding of how our Earth model works, but also to understanding what might happen in the future," Harwood said.
GO TO: ISSUE OF AUGUST 18
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