- Fieldwork in the Antarctic - Ice core drilling camp at Fletcher Promontory, close to where the first WACSWAIN core will be collected.
Recent modelling studies predict that anthropogenic warming could lead to the loss of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) in the next few centuries, and a big rise in sea level.
This new project aims to discover whether the WAIS was destroyed by similar warming in the last interglacial, as modelling and indirect evidence suggest.
The five-year European Research Council (ERC) funded WACSWAIN project, led by Prof. Eric Wolff, will involve colleagues in the Department of Earth Sciences and at the British Antarctic Survey. During field seasons in the West Antarctic the team is drilling drill two new ice cores - a 650 metre-long cotre was successfully retrieved from Skytrain Ice Rise in the 2018-19 field season, and drilling will take place at Sherman Island in early 2020. These will be analysed in Cambridge to understand past retreats of the ice sheet, allowing models for ice sheet cover on the continent over the past 130,000 years to be tested.
Stay up-to-date with the project
Eric and the team will be blogging about the project, including their fieldwork in Antarctica, on the Cambridge Earth Sciences blog.
Meet the WACSWAIN team
At the University of Cambridge:
Dr Helene Hoffmann
At the British Antarctic Survey:
and other staff in the field and working on logistics.
Funders and partners
This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no 742224).
