Thursday, August 12, 2004
IHT: Team will brave ice floes to test climate change: "An international team of scientists left from Norway over the weekend on an expedition to see if the Earth is slowly headed for another ice age or will keep getting warmer.
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The deep-sea drilling mission, co-directed by a University of Rhode Island researcher, has taken more than a decade to organize and could fill in enormous gaps of knowledge, helping scientists better understand the important role of the Arctic in climate change and lending insight into millions of years of the planet's history.
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But first the 19 researchers, more than 150 support staff, three vessels and two helicopters have to accomplish the nearly impossible: They will have to work together among the colliding ice slabs, subfreezing temperatures and blinding fog to retrieve at least 100 coring samples from the same spot, some 500 meters, or 1,600 feet, under the Arctic Ocean seabed.
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Today, only about 250,000 years' worth of Arctic climate records exist, mostly from Greenland ice cores. If the team is successful, it will bring back 50 million years of climate records from a submarine mountain range near the North Pole.
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'We really need this information,' said Kate Moran, the University of Rhode Island professor who is one of the leaders of the six-week journey, the Arctic Coring Expedition. 'We know next to nothing about the Arctic.'
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The search for Arctic climate clues has taken on new urgency in recent years as research has increasingly showed a substantial thinning of Arctic ice and a 5 percent shrinkage in its overall cover.
.
Scientists are deeply divided over the cause of the shift from 'hothouse to icehouse' some 34 million years ago, when the first Antarctic ice sheets began to form. Today, the Earth is in an unusually warm period between ice ages, and scientists"
.
The deep-sea drilling mission, co-directed by a University of Rhode Island researcher, has taken more than a decade to organize and could fill in enormous gaps of knowledge, helping scientists better understand the important role of the Arctic in climate change and lending insight into millions of years of the planet's history.
.
But first the 19 researchers, more than 150 support staff, three vessels and two helicopters have to accomplish the nearly impossible: They will have to work together among the colliding ice slabs, subfreezing temperatures and blinding fog to retrieve at least 100 coring samples from the same spot, some 500 meters, or 1,600 feet, under the Arctic Ocean seabed.
.
Today, only about 250,000 years' worth of Arctic climate records exist, mostly from Greenland ice cores. If the team is successful, it will bring back 50 million years of climate records from a submarine mountain range near the North Pole.
.
'We really need this information,' said Kate Moran, the University of Rhode Island professor who is one of the leaders of the six-week journey, the Arctic Coring Expedition. 'We know next to nothing about the Arctic.'
.
The search for Arctic climate clues has taken on new urgency in recent years as research has increasingly showed a substantial thinning of Arctic ice and a 5 percent shrinkage in its overall cover.
.
Scientists are deeply divided over the cause of the shift from 'hothouse to icehouse' some 34 million years ago, when the first Antarctic ice sheets began to form. Today, the Earth is in an unusually warm period between ice ages, and scientists"
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