ANiSEED

This NERC-funded project will produce a unique high-resolution record of ice sheet thinning over the past 20,000 years from the poorly-known western Amundsen Sea Embayment of Antarctica. Detailed ice sheet histories such as this are urgently needed for testing and improving models that are used to forecast the magnitude and timing of future sea level rise.

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), and particularly its Amundsen Sea sector, is critical for predicting sea level change. The water locked inside it is enough to add up to 1.2 metres to global sea level. Since WAIS is already retreating, there is the potentially for sea level to rise very quickly in the coming few centuries, resulting in widespread damage to low-lying cities around the world.

We will use exciting innovations in the technique of surface exposure dating on rock samples to determine small fluctuations in ice sheet thickness with greater precision than has previously been achieved in Antarctica. This approach will enable us to provide exceptionally-detailed records of past ice sheet change over centuries to millennia.

An important strand of the project is the collaboration with modellers who use geological data to test and tune their ice sheet models. Our new data will permit significant improvements in their model outputs, ultimately contributing to more accurate prediction of future global sea level rise.

To understand why glaciers in the western Amundsen Sea Embayment are important, watch this video by Eric Rignot (Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA):

Principal Investigator Jo Johnson is a geochemist specialising in Quaternary dating techniques. She has worked on reconstructing ice sheet history and palaeoenvironments at BAS since 2002, and as a Marie Tharp Fellow at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in 2011. As well as managing the project and interpreting results, she will be undertaking a field season in November 2015 to collect rock samples for reconstructing ice sheet history from the western Amundsen Sea Embayment of Antarctica.

Co-Investigator Steve Roberts’ expertise is in the fields of Quaternary geomorphology and limnology. He also has extensive Antarctic fieldwork experience, and will be accompanying Jo to the western Amundsen Sea Embayment for fieldwork in 2015/16. He will be producing detailed geomorphological maps of the field areas using high-resolution satellite imagery and field observations.

We aim

• To deliver a high-resolution record of past ice sheet change in a critical but poorly understood region of Antarctica, the western Amundsen Sea Embayment, in order to improve our ability to predict sea level rise.

We will publish this record in a format suitable for use in both ice sheet and Glacial Isostatic Adjustment models.

• To employ innovations in the technique of ¹⁰Be exposure dating of rock surfaces, enabling centennial-millennial fluctuations in the rate of ice sheet thinning to be determined with greater precision than before.

• To establish world-leading expertise in high-precision cosmogenic ¹⁰Be exposure dating in the UK.

This will be achieved through transfer of knowledge from Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory to Imperial College London and the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre (SUERC).

It will have great benefit to the UK science community, affording new avenues for cutting-edge research in environmental science.