The Anthropology, Geospatial and Earth Sciences Department will host a seminar by Ocean Discovery lecturer Molly Patterson, Binghamton University. She will present on the “Catchment Sensitivities of the West and East Antarctic Ice Sheets to Orbital Forcing During the Mid- to Late Pliocene.”
When: Friday, March 28
Where: Kopchick 102, 11:15 a.m.–12:15 p.m.
Seminar Abstract
The Antarctic ice sheet appears as a large, massive, homogenous blob on most maps. Yet, some computer models predict there is considerable variability with respect to how the ice sheet may change under various warming scenarios due to different Earth systems processes. Sediment records recovered from the ice margin during ocean drilling expeditions associated with the International Ocean Discovery Program and its predecessor programs can help provide some insight on the causes of Antarctic ice sheet variability. Such insight is fundamental to understanding some of the sensitivities of how the ice sheet might respond to future climate change.
I will present two high-resolution mid-Pliocene to Early Pleistocene (~3.3 to 2.3 Ma) records of iceberg-rafted debris recovered from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet Ross Sea margin and the East Antarctic Ice Sheet Wilkes Land margin collected during IODP Expeditions 374 and 318, respectively. These results suggest that different sectors of marine-based margins of Antarctica’s ice sheets have different sensitivities to various climate and oceanic feedbacks resulting from astronomical variations. Our findings ground-truth computer modeling experiments that highlight large spatial variability in the response of Antarctica’s ice sheet to future warming and that sensitivities of the ice sheet to atmospheric and marine forcing differ in each catchment.