The Ross Sea is a deep bay of the Southern Ocean in Antarctica, between Victoria Land and Marie Byrd Land and within the Ross Embayment, and is the southernmost sea on Earth. It derives its name from the British explorer James Clark Ross who visited this area in 1841. To the west of the sea lies Ross Island and Victoria Land, to the east Roosevelt Island and Edward VII Peninsula in Marie Byrd Land, while the southernmost part is covered by the Ross Ice Shelf, and is about 200 miles (320 km) from the South Pole. Its boundaries and area have been defined by the New Zealand National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research as having an area of 637,000 square kilometres (246,000 sq mi).
An ice core is a core sample that is typically removed from an ice sheet or a high mountain glacier. Since the ice forms from the incremental buildup of annual layers of snow, lower layers are older than upper ones, and an ice core contains ice formed over a range of years. Cores are drilled with hand augers or powered drills; they can reach depths of over two miles (3.2 km), and contain ice up to 800,000 years old.
The West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) is the segment of the continental ice sheet that covers West Antarctica, the portion of Antarctica on the side of the Transantarctic Mountains that lies in the Western Hemisphere. It is classified as a marine-based ice sheet, meaning that its bed lies well below sea level and its edges flow into floating ice shelves. The WAIS is bounded by the Ross Ice Shelf, the Ronne Ice Shelf, and outlet glaciers that drain into the Amundsen Sea.
A polar ice cap or polar cap is a high-latitude region of a planet, dwarf planet, or natural satellite that is covered in ice.
Marie Byrd Land (MBL) is an unclaimed region of Antarctica. With an area of 1,610,000 km2 (620,000 sq mi), it is the largest unclaimed territory on Earth. It was named after the wife of American naval officer Richard E. Byrd, who explored the region in the early 20th century.
The Antarctic ice sheet is a continental glacier covering 98% of the Antarctic continent, with an area of 14 million square kilometres and an average thickness of over 2 kilometres (1.2 mi). It is the largest of Earth's two current ice sheets, containing 26.5 million cubic kilometres of ice, which is equivalent to 61% of all fresh water on Earth. Its surface is nearly continuous, and the only ice-free areas on the continent are the dry valleys, nunataks of the Antarctic mountain ranges, and sparse coastal bedrock. However, it is often subdivided into East Antarctic ice sheet (EAIS), West Antarctic ice sheet (WAIS), and Antarctic Peninsula (AP), due to the large differences in topography, ice flow, and glacier mass balance between the three regions.
The Antarctic oscillation, also known as the Southern Annular Mode (SAM), is a low-frequency mode of atmospheric variability of the southern hemisphere that is defined as a belt of strong westerly winds or low pressure surrounding Antarctica which moves north or south as its mode of variability.
Mount Takahe is a 3,460-metre-high (11,350 ft) snow-covered shield volcano in Marie Byrd Land, Antarctica, 200 kilometres (120 mi) from the Amundsen Sea. It is a c. 30-kilometre-wide (19 mi) mountain with parasitic vents and a caldera up to 8 kilometres (5 mi) wide. Most of the volcano is formed by trachytic lava flows, but hyaloclastite is also found. Snow, ice, and glaciers cover most of Mount Takahe. With a volume of 780 km3 (200 cu mi), it is a massive volcano; the parts of the edifice that are buried underneath the West Antarctic Ice Sheet are probably even larger. It is part of the West Antarctic Rift System along with 18 other known volcanoes.
The European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica (EPICA) is a multinational European project for deep ice core drilling in Antarctica. Its main objective is to obtain full documentation of the climatic and atmospheric record archived in Antarctic ice by drilling and analyzing two ice cores and comparing these with their Greenland counterparts (GRIP and GISP). Evaluation of these records will provide information about the natural climate variability and mechanisms of rapid climatic changes during the last glacial epoch.
The Greenland Ice Core Project (GRIP) was a research project organized through the European Science Foundation (ESF). The project ran from 1989 to 1995, with drilling seasons from 1990 to 1992. In 1988, the project was accepted as an ESF-associated program, and the fieldwork was started in Greenland in the summer of 1989.
An abrupt climate change occurs when the climate system is forced to transition at a rate that is determined by the climate system energy-balance. The transition rate is more rapid than the rate of change of the external forcing, though it may include sudden forcing events such as meteorite impacts. Abrupt climate change therefore is a variation beyond the variability of a climate. Past events include the end of the Carboniferous Rainforest Collapse, Younger Dryas, Dansgaard–Oeschger events, Heinrich events and possibly also the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum. The term is also used within the context of climate change to describe sudden climate change that is detectable over the time-scale of a human lifetime. Such a sudden climate change can be the result of feedback loops within the climate system or tipping points in the climate system.
Dome Fuji, also called Dome F or Valkyrie Dome, is an Antarctic base located in the eastern part of Queen Maud Land. With an altitude of 3,810 metres (12,500 ft) above sea level, it is the second-highest summit or ice dome of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet and represents an ice divide. Dome F is the site of Dome Fuji Station, a research station operated by Japan.
Jean-Robert Petit is a French scientist. He studied chemistry and physics at the University of Grenoble and received a PhD in 1984 in paleoclimatology on the study of the aeolian dust record from Antarctic ice cores.
An ice divide is the boundary on an ice sheet, ice cap or glacier separating opposing flow directions of ice, analogous to a water divide. Ice divides are important for geochronological investigations that use ice cores, since such coring is typically made at highest point of an ice sheet dome to avoid disturbances arising from horizontal ice movement. Ice divides are used for looking at how the atmosphere varied over time. Coring at dome peaks increases precision of reconstructions as it is the place where horizontal motion is at its least. The Raymond Effect operates at ice divides, creating anticlines in the radar-detected isochrones, allowing greater capture of older ice when coring.
Throughout Earth's climate history (Paleoclimate) its climate has fluctuated between two primary states: greenhouse and icehouse Earth. Both climate states last for millions of years and should not be confused with the much smaller glacial and interglacial periods, which occur as alternating phases within an icehouse period and tend to last less than one million years. There are five known icehouse periods in Earth's climate history, namely the Huronian, Cryogenian, Andean-Saharan, Late Paleozoic and Late Cenozoic glaciations.
Siple Dome is an ice dome approximately 100 km wide and 100 km long, located 130 km east of Siple Coast in Antarctica. Charles Bentley and Robert Thomas established a "strain rosette" on this feature to determine ice movement in 1973–74. They referred to the feature as Siple Dome because of its proximity to Siple Coast.
Global surface temperature (GST) is the average temperature of Earth's surface. More precisely, it is the weighted average of the temperatures over the ocean and land. The former is also called sea surface temperature and the latter is called surface air temperature. Temperature data comes mainly from weather stations and satellites. To estimate data in the distant past, proxy data can be used for example from tree rings, corals, and ice cores. Observing the rising GST over time is one of the many lines of evidence supporting the scientific consensus on climate change, which is that human activities are causing climate change. Alternative terms for the same thing are global mean surface temperature (GMST) or global average surface temperature.
Climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions from human activities occurs everywhere on Earth, and while Antarctica is less vulnerable to it than any other continent, climate change in Antarctica has been observed. Since 1959, there has been an average temperature increase of >0.05 °C/decade since 1957 across the continent, although it had been uneven. West Antarctica warmed by over 0.1 °C/decade from the 1950s to the 2000s, and the exposed Antarctic Peninsula has warmed by 3 °C (5.4 °F) since the mid-20th century. The colder, stabler East Antarctica had been experiencing cooling until the 2000s. Around Antarctica, the Southern Ocean has absorbed more oceanic heat than any other ocean, and has seen strong warming at depths below 2,000 m (6,600 ft). Around the West Antarctic, the ocean has warmed by 1 °C (1.8 °F) since 1955.
Jérôme Chappellaz is a French glaciologist, geochemist and paleoclimatologist who is director of the French Polar Institute. A senior researcher at France's National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), he is a co-founder and chairman of the Ice Memory Foundation.
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