Directory

Start date:
November 2014
End date:
November 2014
Locations:
Table Mountain, Pearce Valley, Mount Fleming, Lower Wright Valley, Friis Hills
Principle Investigator:
Professor Gary Wilson
Organisation:
University of Otago
"Climate models predict that past warming resulted in melting of Antarctic ice. In order to predict future impacts of warming, we are compelled to ask: How much warming and how much melting? Ice cores cannot answer these questions, as they do not sample far enough back in time. But, frozen ground has persisted for much longer and it represents an archive of past microbial life. We propose to use the genetic code from the microbes along with a growing genetic database to determine the temperature of past warm intervals and thus determine if past atmospheric warming drove melting of ice. WE will:
Recover 3-5m long permafrost cores from four sites - Table Mountain, Pearse Valley, Mount Fleming and Lower Wright Valley. Subample and matain cores frozen including for return to NZ; and
Landscape and surface feature mapping and cosmogenic sample collection at four sites - Table Mountain, Pearse Valley, Mount Fleming and Lower Wright Valley"