Dr Tina van de Flierdt, from the Department of Earth Science and Engineering, with colleagues from other international universities, have been looking very closely into Antarcticas past to gain insights into the Earths future.
They lived on a research vessel in the southern ocean ofd Antarcticas for 9 weeks as part of the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program.
They drilled in waters up to four kilometres deep and into sediment up to one kilometre beneath the sea floor, to explore how Antarctic has been changing.
Back on dry land, Dr Van de Flierdt and Carys Cook, a PhD student in the Grantham Institute for Climate Change, analysed the samples abd deduced that global warming five million years ago may have caused one of Antarcticas large ice sheets to partially melt abd sea levels to rise by approximately 20 metres. This is significant because carbon dioxide concentrations then were similar to the levels currently found on earth.
Source: Imperial College, London, Uk
0 comments:
Post a Comment