Scientific Antarctic Drilling Program (ANDRILL) International

The program involves more than 200 scientists, students and educators from five nations (Germany, Italy, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States), with the hope of attracting additional international partners for future endeavours.

The main objective is to core sediment in and around Antarctica to recover a history of paleoenvironmental changes that will guide our understanding of how fast, how large, and how frequently glacial and interglacial changes were in the Antarctica region. Ultimately, such data on the past evolution of Antarctica will provide constraints to future scenarios of global warming, highlighting potential timing frequency and site of future changes.

The McMurdo Sound region has been the first area for Antarctic drilling under the ANDRILL banner, and the main science objectives for this region include:

• Obtaining high-resolution sediment cores that record major glacial events and transitional periods over the past 40 million years;
• Determining orbital and sub-orbital glacio-climatic fluctuations that vary on 100,000, 40,000, and 20,000 year cycles;
• Obtaining a refined record of the onset and development of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS) 40 million years ago;
• Identifying how the Antarctic region responded to past events of global warmth;
• Deriving a detailed history of Antarctic Holocene environmental change at the end of the last glaciation; and
• Testing global linkages between climate changes in the Northern and Southern hemispheres.

Administration and logistics

Operations and logistics for ANDRILL are managed by Antarctica New Zealand.

The scientific research is administered and coordinated through the ANDRILL Science Management Office, located at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Further information is available at www.andrill.org

Recent drilling activity

- McMurdo Ice Shelf (MIS) completed January 2007

- Southern McMurdo Sound (SMS) completed December 2007

- Drilling in the Coulman High area is planned for 2013

On-ice and off-ice teams are currently working on analysis and synthesis of results from both the MIS and SMS projects.

Proposed future work

- Coulman High

- Southern McMurdo Ice Shelf

- Offshore New Harbour