Antarctica, the world’s final frontier, represents an outstanding outdoor laboratory to research planetary processes, including the impacts of climate change and ocean change. During the past 50 years, the Western Antarctic Peninsula has warmed three degrees C, triggering a cascading series of geological and biological changes in this fragile ecosystem that have global implications.
During the past two years I’ve used Antarctica as an experiential teaching platform, speaking to many of AAPG’s key stakeholders about the pivotal role that geoscientists play in studying climate change and ocean change.
Whether presenting to an audience of 2,100 junior high school students in Calgary – who enthusiastically drummed their feet on the auditorium floor as I walked onto the stage – or speaking to the New York Explorers Club, my role as a geoscientist is to translate what I learn in Antarctica, educating and empowering people to formulate scientifically-driven global solutions for today’s social, economic, energy and global sustainability challenges.
As the AAPG Foundation’s Antarctic Explorer-in-Residence, I invite you to join me, virtually, as I explore the Bottom of the World.
‘The Dimension of Time’
Organized around the 125th anniversary of the Geological Society of America (GSA), it and the Jackson School of Geosciences have assembled a world-renowned group of earth science professors from the Jackson School of Geosciences, Stanford University, Pennsylvania State University and the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
The expedition begins in the Falkland Islands and continues to the island of South Georgia and the Western Antarctic Peninsula (the three areas constitute the “Scotia Arc”).
AAPG member Sharon Mosher, dean of the Jackson School of Geosciences and chair of GSA’s 125th anniversary celebrations, said that “In honor of the GSA anniversary we’ll be celebrating advances in geoscience – our science, our societal impact and our unique thought processes – with a series of meetings, field trips and publications throughout 2013.
“We decided that it was only fitting to have the inaugural event be a grand expedition to one of the most remote and fascinating geological areas which surrounds the Scotia Sea,” she said.
Mosher, who is participating in the Scotia Arc expedition, explained that a similar trip, celebrating the International Geologic Congress in 1989, spawned decades of research on Rodinia, the supercontinent that existed between 1.1 billion and 750 million years ago.
“Who knows what new ideas we will discover on this voyage?” she asked.
One hundred intrepid explorers from 15 nations will travel – on a voyage of discovery for 22 days – aboard the MV Akademik Ioffee, a 117-meter-long, Russian ice-strengthened vessel. The explorers will study the dynamic Earth and the relationship between plate tectonics, glacial processes, climate and life. And, they’ll experience numerous Serengeti-like moments, witnessing some of the largest concentrations of wildlife on the planet.
Dalziel, the expedition’s scientific leader, is a research professor with the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics and a Fellow of the Geological Society of America. He has over 40 years of Antarctic experience in plate tectonics and volcanism.
A self-described “old-fashioned structural geologist,” his Antarctic research involves studying the interaction between plate tectonics and the environment.
“Climate change is happening,” Dalziel said. “There are uncertainties, and we’re trying to quantify them – one thing that earth scientists bring to the table is the dimension of time.”
Rapid warming of the Western Antarctic Peninsula has attracted global scientific attention, and geoscientists, biologists and oceanographers are working together to quantify the changes taking place in our planetary environment.
Describing Antarctica and the Scotia Arc as the “nexus of the world’s great climate engine,” Dalziel said, “You can’t understand the climate unless you understand the solid Earth. Things happening in the interior of the Earth can impact the surface of the Earth in a way that biology cannot.”
Dalziel’s research quantifies isostatic rebound of the land below Antarctica’s continental glaciers, and suggests that it’s occurring at a rate of one millimeter per year. Using airborne gravity surveys and a network of on-the-ground seismic stations, he measures the density of Antarctica’s continental ice sheets and of the underlying Earth’s crust and mantle.
Dalziel’s recent geological and geophysical investigations indicate that Antarctica’s continental ice sheets may not be thinning as rapidly as satellite images from space have previously measured.
Back To The Future
Robert Dunbar, one of the expedition’s scientific lecturers, is the W.M. Keck Professor of Earth Sciences and the Victoria P. and Roger W. Sant Director of the Earth Systems Program at Stanford University. He’s also the J. Frederick and Elizabeth B. Weintz Fellow in Undergraduate Education and a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and the Institute for International Studies.
A marine geologist, Dunbar has traveled to Antarctica more than 31 times during the past 30 years. He studies the impacts of climate change – both today and in the geological past – from the tropics to the poles.
Specializing in paleoclimate and biogeochemistry, Dunbar runs the Stable Isotope Lab at Stanford University. His research attempts to quantify heat transfer from the warmest to the coldest parts of the planet. Descending in submersible submarines to 2,000 meters in the deep ocean, Dunbar has explored and documented this rarely-seen underwater world – he’s made 14 deep dives and has discovered, on average, a couple of new species during each dive.
Dalziel and Dunbar believe that increasing levels of atmospheric CO2 translate to ocean warming; acting as a huge heat sink, the ocean transports this extra energy to the Antarctic ice shelves and glaciers.
“Heat storage in the ocean comes from climate change,” Dunbar said, noting that Antarctica is warming at a rate that’s eight times that of the global average. “When you visit Antarctica, you get a sense of the rate of change that’s possible.
Dunbar is a proponent of teaching in the field and “on the ice.”
He describes glaciers – and the icebergs that they spawn – as “equal opportunity transporters” of sediments from the land to the continental shelf.
Most geologists, he said, view turbidite flows as the primary mechanism for offshore sediment transport, but he adds, “I’m always amazed by the transport capabilities of ice.”
In order to reconstruct Antarctica’s paleoclimate and to predict future climate change, Dunbar has drilled (and cored) through the Ross Ice Shelf, Earth’s largest floating ice shelf. Not only has he drilled through the ice shelf – it’s the size of Alaska – but he’s drilled through the underlying water column and 1,300 meters into the unconsolidated sea floor sediments that often contain boulders measuring 50 centimeters across.
Dunbar describes this ground-breaking research as “drilling back into the future.”
His paleoclimate reconstructions – from ice and sediment cores and from biogeochemistry – show that the Western Antarctic’s ice shelves have melted, completely or almost completely, 30 to 40 times during the past three to four million years, precipitating a sea level rise, each time, on the order of six meters.
This Time, Expedition Has Urgency
Acentury ago, Sir Ernest Shackleton’s scientific teams of geologists and geophysicists explored Antarctica because it was there, and because it was unclaimed by any nation.
During this heroic age of Antarctic exploration, geoscientists discovered volcanoes, mountain ranges, fossils, coal and minerals in this uncharted continent.
In 1909, geoscientists in Shackleton’s Nimrod Expedition planted the British flag at the South Magnetic Pole.
Antarctica still contains many geological secrets: In 2009, Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory Institute deployed an airborne gravity system in Antarctica’s Gamburtsev Province, discovering sub-glacial ghost mountain ranges – extending 800 kilometers, or the length of the European Alps – and sub-glacial lakes.
One hundred years later, Antarctica is still unclaimed by any nation. This mysterious continent belongs to citizens of the world and is development-free until 2041, when the Madrid Protocol, declaring it a place for peace and scientific endeavors, expires.
Today geoscientists explore Antarctica, not because it’s there, but because it might not be there – in its icebound majesty – in the future.