Time: 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm
School of Geography, Environment, and Earth Sciences Seminar Room
Cotton Building Room 304
Kelburn Campus
Victoria University of Wellington
Please join us this Thursday to hear about some of the science undertaken in Antarctica this summer. We will have four speakers explain their findings and experiences from their field work during the 2017/18 season:
Dr Vonda Cummings, NIWA Antarctic marine ecosystem resilience: New Harbour
A team of coastal marine ecologists spent 5-weeks on the sea ice in New Harbour in late 2017. They studied the resilience of Antarctic biota and ecosystems to climate-related environmental changes by conducting experiments and making collections to see how the sea floor ecology now differs from that seen there 15 years ago.
Jamey Stutz, VUW – Recent deglacial history of the David Glacier, Northern Victoria Land
Our team collected ~100 glacial erratics from 5 sites stretching from the Terra Nova Bay coastline to the East Antarctic Ice Sheet interior. We will use in situ cosmogenic nuclide surface exposure dating to determine when each erratic was deposited by the thinning glacier, integrating age and elevation to provide a LGM-present thinning history of the glacier.
Jenny Black, GNS Science – Aerogeophysical survey of the Ross Ice Shelf
ROSETTA ice is a large multi-disciplinary project involving many international teams. The project utilises the ICEPOD instrument suite and multiple airborne gravity techniques to study three main aspects: ice, ocean, and underlying sea bed/tectonics. This talk reports on some of the 370 TB of data have now been collected through ~40 flights over three years.
Gavin Dunbar, VUW – Beneath the Ross Ice Shelf
The sea floor under the Ross Ice Shelf has been sampled for the first time since 1979 as part of the RIS Project. Fortuitously the tools used to melt through the ice shelf and enabled us to deploy instruments into the ocean and sediment below also recovered sediment from the basal layers of the ice shelf. In this talk I’ll discuss the implications for ice shelf dynamics.
