SIU professor part of Antarctica drilling project to study climate change

During the past two years, scientists in Antarctica have drilled more than 4,215 feet into the Earth's core and more than 20 million years back into its sedimentary history in an effort to understand how the planet's climate has changed through geologic time. The object of their search this year, evidence of the changes that occurred 14 and 15 million years ago, has been called the Rosetta Stone of global climate change.

In the 1990s, the Cape Roberts Project brought up core from 17 million to 40 million years ago. Last year, the current project provided data from 13 million years ago to the present. The warmest part of the middle Miocene Epoch 14-15 million years ago could be the missing key to the geologic map scientists have been piecing together. During that period, the Earth was warmer than it is now and climate conditions in the Antarctic resembled those of southern Alaska today.

Establishing a chronology for the sequence of changes in the past is critical to understanding climate change today, scientists say. Last week, a United Nations report warned that the world has a window of less than a decade to be able to reverse the current course of climate change.

"There is now overwhelming scientific evidence that the world is moving toward the point at which irreversible ecological catastrophe becomes unavoidable," the report stated.

The Antarctic Geological Drilling Program (ANDRILL) includes scientists from the U.S., New Zealand, Germany and Italy. The second year of drilling concluded last weekend. The scientists will continue poring over the sediment brought to the surface and analyzing their data. They won't begin publishing their findings for another 18 months to two years. Dr. Scott Ishman, a geology professor at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, is at McMurdo Station to evaluate the sediment recovered for foraminifera, a shelled protozoan the size of a grain of sand. Some species of foraminifera prefer to live in warmer waters, some in colder. The fossils Ishman looked at from this period consist of species that prefer the warmer conditions. His research findings supported the theory that Antarctica was much warmer during the middle Miocene period than today.