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Contact: Esena Jackson
After
the spectacular 2002 collapse of Antarctica's Larsen B
Ice Shelf, an area roughly the size of Rhode Island, Eugene
Domack, professor of geosciences at Hamilton College,
led the first team of scientists into the area that had
been undisturbed for nearly 10,000 years. Domack, who
was investigating the cause for the shelf's collapse as
well as the Antarctic Peninsula's response to warming,
made a serendipitous discovery in 2005, a vast ecosystem
beneath the collapsed ice shelf made up of a thriving
clam community, mud volcanoes and bacterial mats.
Known as a cold-seep community, the ecosystem is the
first finding of this type in the Antarctic. The discovery
could provide evidence for researchers to better understand
the dynamics within the inhospitable sub-ice setting,
which covers nearly 580,000 square miles of seafloor.
Accompanied by five Hamilton students, Domack will return
to the area to search for clues in the sediment of Antarctica's
seafloor when he embarks on a month-long expedition to
Antarctica on April 11. Researchers from seven collaborating
U.S. and international institutions* will participate
in this expedition that is among the very few that include
undergraduate student researchers. For more on the expedition
and to view daily journal entries and photos from the
ship, visit www.hamilton.edu/antarctica.
In addition to sampling and mapping the ecosystem discovered
last year, Domack says the team hopes to outline the longer-term
history of the Larsen Ice B and possibly C shelves by
collecting sediments that are believed to be more than
10,000 years old.
The Antarctic Peninsula, which juts northward off the
western part of the continent, is experiencing greater
warming than almost anywhere on Earth. The Peninsula warmed
by an approximately of 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the past
60 years, and lost 5,200 square miles of ice in the past
three years. "Our work contributes to the understanding
of these climatic changes -- where they are occurring
first and with greatest magnitude and impact upon the
environment," says Domack.
Over the past 25 years, Domack has studied the paleohistory
of Antarctica and investigated how glaciers move sediment
off the land and into the ocean. He was awarded $851,941
from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Office of Polar
Programs in 2004 for a three-year study aimed at understanding
how Antarctica's climate has varied over the past hundreds
and thousands of years, and how those changes have shaped
the continent, particularly its ice shelves.
In the cover article of the August 4, 2005 issue of the
journal Nature, Domack published the first evidence that
the collapse of Antarctica's Larsen B Ice Shelf was unprecedented
during the past 10,000 years. Using data collected from
sediment core samples in the vicinity of the former ice
shelf, Domack and his colleagues concluded that the Larsen
ice shelf had been intact but was slowly thinning during
the course of the current interglacial period.
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Hamilton.edu-
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