The team plan to do offshore drilling, with
a drill that can manage seven kilometers
of water and a further two kilometers of
rock in the sea bed.
Image: iStockphoto

A Victoria University researcher is part of the world’s largest marine geoscience project, drilling deep beneath the Antarctic to discover clues to climate change.

Dr Rob McKay, a post-doctoral fellow at Victoria's Antarctic Research Centre, is aboard the Joides Resolution research ship bound for Wilkes Land, Antarctica.

Dr McKay says the two-month expedition would help to understand the past climate history of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet.

"The project will essentially provide a snapshot of cooling and warming in the Antarctic from 34 million years ago to the present day and try to understand how these changes affected the global climate system, in particular the Southern Ocean.

"The East Antarctic Ice Sheet is the world's largest and we hope to collect rocks that are over 34 million years old. These will help document the onset of glaciation in Antarctica and the end of the greenhouse world—when there were forests in Antarctica."

The Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) team set sail in early January from Wellington where the drilling ship docked after spending two months collecting core samples from sediments in the Canterbury Basin, beneath the sea off south Canterbury.

"It's exciting to be part of a large collaborative project. The boat has an incredible set-up and the crew are highly experienced so the chances of a successful expedition are as high as possible," says Dr McKay.

The "incredible set-up" on the ship includes a drill pipe made up of separate tubes which is dropped to the sea floor from a drilling station in the middle of the ship. Into this the drill is sent down to cut through the sediment, bringing up samples of rock core. The equipment can drill to depths of seven kilometres in water and then a further two kilometres beneath the sea floor.

The expedition builds on Dr McKay's PhD research, supervised by Professors Tim Naish and Peter Barrett, some of which focused on the land-based ANDRILL project which drilled samples from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. The work of the IODP expedition hopes to correlate the results of both ice sheets.

The IODP is a high-profile international scientific collaboration supported by 24 countries. New Zealand recently joined through the Australia-New Zealand IODP consortium membership (ANZIC).

Six research institutions are currently part of the project. Alongside Victoria University, these include GNS Science, the universities of Auckland, Waikato, Canterbury and Otago. The remainder of the funding is provided by the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology.