Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Department of
Date of this Version
3-17-2009
Citation
Eos, Vol. 90, No. 11, 17 March 2009.
Abstract
The Antarctic Geological Drilling (ANDRILL) program—a collaboration between Germany, Italy, New Zealand, and the United States that is one of the larger programs endorsed by the International Polar Year (IPY; http:// www .ipy .org)—successfully completed the drilling phase of the Southern McMurdo Sound (SMS) Project in December 2007. This second drill core of the program’s campaign in the western Ross Sea, Antarctica, complements the results of the first drilling season [Naish et al., 2007] by penetrating deeper into the stratigraphic section in the Victoria Land Basin and extending the recovered time interval back to approximately 20 million years ago.
The primary objectives of ANDRILL (http:// www .andrill .org/) were to recover stratigraphic records from the Antarctic continental margin that document key steps in Antarctica’s Cenozoic (0- to 65-million- year- old) climatic and glacial history, and in the tectonic evolution of the Transantarctic Mountains and the West Antarctic Rift System [Harwood et al., 2006]. These two ANDRILL stratigraphic drill cores are guiding the understanding of the speed, size, and frequency of the past 20 million years of glacial and interglacial changes in the Antarctic region. The drill cores will help to establish, through their correlation to existing records and their integration with climate and ice sheet models, how these local changes relate to regional and global events.