Antarctica

Recently AGES lab members Sidney Hemming and Trevor Williams sailed on International Ocean Discovery Program Expedition 382, to collect long sedimentary records of sources of iceberg rafted sediments around Antarctica and evidence for past history of Antarctica's ice sheets and ocean circulation (https://iodp.tamu.edu/scienceops/expeditions/iceberg_alley_paleoceanography.html ). 

Members of the AGES lab have worked on Antarctic research projects for twenty years, beginning with a survey of sediment provenance by Sidney Hemming, Martin Roy, and Tina van de Flierdt (van de Flierdt et al., 2007; Roy et al., 2007) that was originally motivated to understand Antarctica's sediment contribution to the Southern Ocean. It quickly grew to embrace the potential for using the ages and isotopic compositions of subglacial sources to understand the history of Antarctica's ice sheets, and to understand the erosion history of the landscapes there starting with a detrital thermochronology paper that was the subject of Stephen Cox's senior thesis research (Cox et al., 2008). The work has expanded to include multiple international collaborations and a focus on subglacial geology and the tectonic history of the Antarctic continent as well as ice sheet evolution. Current projects include the sedimentary provenance studies in East and West Antarctica, the tectonic history of the Transantarctic Mountains, the early history of the Antarctic Ice Sheet, and modern patterns of ice flow and erosion.

 

Columbia Affiliations