An entire continent remains a mystery.
Expeditions have trekked the surface of Antarctica, but University of Nebraska-Lincoln geosciences professor David Harwood said what lies beneath has not been identified.
“The history of Antarctica is not yet known,” he said.
But Harwood said he and a team of 80 to 100 scientists from around the world hope to discover its past with the ANDRILL project.
By the fall of 2006, he said, his international team of scientists hopes to have a drill capable of reaching as far as 2,000 meters below Antarctica’s surface and extracting fossils and sediments stowed in the depths.
Richard Levy, a UNL research assistant professor of geosciences, acts as a staff scientist for ANDRILL. The fossils and sediments the drill would retrieve, he said, could hold secrets of how Antarctica’s climate had changed, just like they could reveal the history of a landlocked area like Nebraska.
“In your backyard today,” he said, “there are things growing that are dependent on the local climate.”
But many years from now, if scientists found a layer of spruce forest fossils on top of the layer created by today’s climate, they could assume a cooler climate came to Nebraska and spruce forests migrated south.
The same kind of logic, he said, would allow scientists to decipher the climatic history of Antarctica.
Like changes in earth’s climate, though, large research projects tend to take a while, especially if they require a drill with the force to bore through a 300-meter thick ice shelf.
Scientists conceived ANDRILL in 1999, Levy said, and it got rolling several years after that.
Harwood said no drilling was scheduled until 2006. At the moment, he said, scientists are working to buy and assemble the massive drill.
“We’re just waiting on final notice,” Levy said.
While the ANDRILL Science Management Office operated out of UNL, the industrial part of the operation, including drill construction, would take place in New Zealand, which is participating in the project along with Italy and Germany.
The drill, Harwood said, would contain six parts, one of which the UNL scientists are helping to fund.
When finished, he said, the team would tow the drill to Antarctica on “sleds and skis.” He said he hoped it would all be ready by fall 2006, because drilling on the frozen continent only works well during one season.
“We have a very narrow window from October to December,” he said.
While drilling to find Antarctica’s past may seem like a trivial curiosity, Harwood said, the wintry mass’ past could help scientists better comprehend global climate change.
To fully understand major changes like global warming, or even minor ones like El Niño, researchers must look at the entire earth, he said.
“We’re trying to unlock how Antarctica has responded to, and perhaps caused, global climate change,” he said.
Whatever they find, Harwood and Levy both said they would brave the cold to see it.
“I’m definitely going down there,” Harwood said. “It’s the birth of a new tool.”
Be the first to comment on this article!