New Zealand team to probe uncharted Antarctic ice in sea level study

A team of New Zealand researchers will be exploring uncharted territory in Antarctica this month in a bid to get a better understanding of sea level rises caused by global climate change.

The University of Otago-led team will drive tracked vehicles and snowmobiles 350 kilometers from New Zealand's Scott Base station to a field site in a central region of the Ross Ice Shelf (RIS), the world's largest ice shelf.

A vehicle rigged with crevasse-detecting radar would lead the way because the RIS, which was the size of France and hid an ocean of greater volume than Europe's North Sea, was largely unexplored, research leader Christina Hulbe said Monday.

The team would take their own seismic "thumper" to provide a sound source for acoustic-based imaging of the seafloor and its sediment layers, Hulbe said in a statement.

Deep-sounding radar would be used to study interaction between ice at the base of the RIS and the underlying ocean as the team spent up to 10 days at the site.

When they return next southern spring, the researchers will use a hot water drill to bore through the ice to observe the ice-ocean interface directly, measure ocean properties and sample sediments on the sea floor.

Over the course of the four-year research program, the researchers would analyze seafloor sediment cores enabling them to reconstruct the Ross Ice Shelf's history since the last ice age and improve forecasts of future change.

"We know that the past climate warming caused ice shelf and ice sheet retreat in the Ross Sea. Now we need to find out more about the actual physical processes and the rates at which they acted in the past," Hulbe said.

This shelf was a major interface between the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) and the warming ocean.

When the RIS responds to climate warming, the WAIS was at greater risk of collapse, which would in turn accelerate global sea level rise. Endit