WACSWAIN project: does the preliminary timescale suggest we have captured the ice from the Last Interglacial period in the Skytrain ice core?
Abstract
The stability of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) and its contribution to global sea level rise during the Last Interglacial (LIG) period has gained interest as predictions suggest a warmer climate during the next centuries. Global sea level during the LIG may have been 6 to 9 m higher than present, during a period when the global climate may have been around 2°C warmer, and some of the rise in sea level may have come from a collapse of the WAIS. One direct way to test this hypothesis is to drill ice cores from around the WAIS region to check for the presence of LIG ice, and to use the suite of analytical tools to understand the regional climate and glaciological setting during the LIG. Earlier ice cores from the Weddell Sea region (e.g. from the Fletcher Promontory and Berkner Island) have clearly included LIG ice close to the bed, indicating that even low-lying ice rises close to the WAIS were probably still present at the LIG. However, data from these earlier cores are equivocal about the presence of the WAIS itself, so the WACSWAIN project was designed to recover a new core from Skytrain Ice Rise from a site where the accumulation rate is low, and where radar indicates that the isochrones arch to shallower depths, both criteria leaving any LIG ice further from the bedrock. Other presentations in this session have detailed some of the early data obtained from the Skytrain ice core, which reached bedrock at 651 m in January 2019. In this contribution to the project, we make a first analysis of the likely age scale for the ice using the PaleoChrono program developed at IGE and the preliminary analytical data from the core. We assess whether we are likely to have captured the LIG ice from Skytrain, and the likely resolution of data we will obtain from the LIG.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2020
- Bibcode:
- 2020AGUFMC033...01M
- Keywords:
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- 3344 Paleoclimatology;
- ATMOSPHERIC PROCESSES;
- 0414 Biogeochemical cycles;
- processes;
- and modeling;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES;
- 0724 Ice cores;
- CRYOSPHERE;
- 0726 Ice sheets;
- CRYOSPHERE