An urgent priority for scientists is estimating the rate at which the Antarctic Ice Sheet will melt over the coming decades and centuries. 

Despite our ever-improving understanding of ice sheet dynamics, difficulties associated with modelling polar ice sheet response to climate change remains the largest source of uncertainty in global sea-level projections. This is especially true when modelling the Antarctic Ice Sheet.

 

The SWAIS2C project will:

  • Drill beneath the seafloor to recover sediment cores at two locations along the Siple Coast of West Antarctica, where land ice begins to float and form the Ross Ice Shelf. This region where the land ice begins to float is called the grounding zone.
  • Extract geological data from these sediment cores to reconstruct environmental conditions that characterised the drill sites as climate changed in the past. We will focus on periods of prior warmth to determine whether the Ross Ice Shelf disappeared and how far the grounding zone retreated or advanced.
  • Use numerical models to simulate ice sheet response to these past intervals of warmth. Data from the drill cores will provide constraints for the models to test and enhance their ability to simulate prior environmental changes in West Antarctica.
Sediment cores are crucial for climate studies as they allow us to glimpse past periods when climate was warmer than today and like that we expect in the coming decades. Every core we collect will contain layers of data that allow us to look back hundreds, thousands, and millions of years into Earth’s past. Through our frontier geoscience and cutting-edge technology, we can uncover a treasure trove of information. New data we glean from the cores will give us unique insight into past environmental change in Antarctica.
Professor Richard Levy
SWAIS2C Co-Chief Scientist

Researchers, engineers, and logistics providers representing 10 countries held a virtual workshop in October 2020. The aim was to evaluate and plan for interdisciplinary scientific opportunities and engineering challenges for an International Continental Drilling Program (ICDP) project along the Siple Coast near the grounding zone of the WAIS. At this meeting, the members outlined specific research objectives and logistical challenges associated with the recovery of Neogene and Quaternary geological records from the West Antarctic interior adjacent to the Kamb Ice Stream and at Crary Ice Rise. 

New geophysical surveys at these locations identified drilling targets in which new drilling technologies will allow for the recovery of up to 200 m of sediments beneath the ice sheet. Sub-ice-shelf records have so far proven difficult to obtain but are critical to better constrain marine ice sheet sensitivity to past and future increases in global mean surface temperature up to 2°C (3.5°F) above pre-industrial levels.

Our partnerships
The resulting international partnership is comprised of geologists, glaciologists, oceanographers, geophysicists, microbiologists, climate and ice sheet modelers, engineers, and outreach specialists. The scientific and technological advances developed through this program will enable us to test whether the West Antarctic Ice Shelf collapsed during past intervals of warmth and to determine its sensitivity to a +2 °C global warming threshold.

Workshop report

Patterson, M. O., et al. (2022). Sensitivity of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet to +2 °C (SWAIS 2C). In Scientific Drilling (Vol. 30, pp. 101–112). Copernicus GmbH. https://doi.org/10.5194/sd-30-101-2022