Drilling for the Future in Antarctica’s past

The Antarctic continent covers ~60 times the area of the UK and is covered by up to four kilometres of ice. The survival of this ice under warming temperatures will largely determine future global sea level and life in coastal regions around the globe. But what will the scale of sea level rise be and how quickly will it happen? These are difficult questions to answer.

However, work by Tina van de Flierdt, Professor of Isotope Geochemistry at Imperial College London, has provided some important clues. Examining the chemical fingerprint of sediments deposited in the ocean around Antarctica provides a window into time periods where temperatures were one, two or even three degrees warmer than today.

In Tina’s inaugural lecture she will highlight some of the complex relationships between global temperature and sea level rise and discuss the need for more sophisticated geological records of the ice sheet history in order to create more complete models of our future.