COMMENT Ice shelf melts as 40s roar

• Published date: 11 April 2024
• Author: Bob Bingham Bob Bingham is a retired marketing director now alerting people to the dangers of climate change, and working to repair the damage to the planet by planting trees.
• Publication title: Northland Age, The

The research team of 40 scientists used the Joides Resolution research vessel and they took sediment cores from seven locations in remote parts of the Southern Ocean. The cores were 150-200m deep, and the record goes back about 5.3 million years. The core samples were examined carefully and showed that with a strong ocean current, more large items of debris were deposited, and in a slow current smaller pieces were found because they could settle in the lower water speed

In this way they could correlate with other data such as the Andril project, which collected 1250m of sediment cores with records that went back went back 20 million years. The Andril project was looking to see when the ice repeatedly disappeared from the Ross Ice Shelf, which is all part of the same scenario.

The Southern Ocean is the biggest atmospheric and ocean system on the planet and yet, because of its remoteness and extreme conditions, relatively little is known about it. If we are to get a proper handle on climate change, we need to...