It is just a bit more than two years since I made my last post here, and since we had the sampling party to take the material from our fantastic expedition back home.

Today, the first major scientific results of our endeavour were published in the journal Nature.
The team led by Jorg Pross, which included myself and my graduate student Claire Huck, found amazing evidence from spores and pollen in the very old cores we recovered. These cores reached back to the early Eocene, a time which is often described as part of the ‘Greenhouse world’. Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations were a lot higher back then, probably similar to what we would get when burning all our fossil fuels. We always knew that it must have been warm around Antarctica back then, but our work for the first time shows direct evidence for near tropical warmth at the Antarctic continental margin.

52 Million years ago, the Wilkes Land coast of Antarctica was covered by near-tropical forests as they today occur in NE Australia. Copyright Sven Brenner – Fotolia.com.

Joerg and his colleagues found pollen grains from palm trees and relatives of the modern baobab and macadamia. Such plants have very defined temperature ranges they are happy with, which dictate that even winter temperatures have to have been above 10°C. In contrast today, the winters in this area of Antarctica can easily reach temperatures of -10 to -20°C. Mean annuanl temperatures were probably around 17°C – quite a pleasent environment to live it and different to the ice-dominated world we witnessed two years ago!

The scientific significance of this study is far reaching. We think that during the so-called Greenhouse world atmospheric CO2 concentrations were at least double as high as they are today, and that the temperature gradient between the poles and the equator was much less pronounced than today. However, if we try to simulate the response of the climate system in models, it is very hard to achieve such a low ‘meridional temperature gradient’. Our new data deliver some key benchmark values that now have to be reconciled by models. Being successful at reconstructing Greenhouse climates may be very relevant for looking into our own future.

Before I finish I should of course give a big cheer to Claire Huck who contributed to this study by analysing some of the mud from the Eocene and figuring out where it was coming from based on its geochemical provenance. Watch this space, for more exciting data and results to come from her and from Carys Cook, who works on reconstructing the paleoclimate at the Antarctic margin in the Pliocene, just a few milion years back in time.

Also check the coverage by the BBC, which was among the first to pick up on the story.

Finally the long time without my ship mates was over …

From 15 June to 25 June many of the shipboard participants from IODP expedition 318 met again in College Station, Texas, to bring the first stage of our science mission to conclusion, and make a start to the second stage. The first stage of course was the seagoing part, which you all could follow through the blogs. As I mentioned in my blogs, part of the job when sailing as a scientist in the Integrated Ocean Drilling Programme is to write a lot of reports. Every time we finished drilling at a new site in the ocean, a full report had to be written up, describing the operational side of things, but also the sediments we found, what ages they had, and what their physical properties and geochemical composition was. As you may imagine, doing scientific writing after 9 weeks of 12 hours shifts every day can be quite tough, and hence it was very good that we revisited all our writings and gave it final touches. The big report containing all the information will be published next summer. Why do we wait this long? A lot of the information that is contained in the reports from our Expedition is unique findings that can lead straight into a scientific publication. In order to allow the scientist, who collected the material, to get first dips on publication, a so-called moratorium is in place. This means that for 1 year nobody else but the people who were part of Expedition 318 will see the reports or get any samples.

Imperial PhD student Carys Cook in front of the IODP sign in College Station/Texas.

But don’t worry – we surely will flood upcoming meetings with results much earlier than next summer. To make sure that this will happen, we entered step two, which is the actual shore-based science work. During five days in College Station, we all worked in shifts again to sample all the cores. This time, however, we did take samples for all of our individual science projects. In my case, this is to look at the history of the East Antarctic ice sheet as reconstructed from ice-rafted debris ,and to understand the interplay of continental weathering, ocean circulation and CO2 drawdown during the onset of Antarctic glaciation some 34 million years ago. Two very exciting projects, which I am lucky to have two motivated PhD students for! But also this stage of the expedition will involve a lot of team work -no single group or researcher can do all the analyses required, to answer the big picture questions in Earth and Climate sciences alone. Hence already back on the ship we formed topical teams, which will join forces to tackle the big science questions out there. Happy data production everybody and more soon!

Below a picture from the ‘sampling party’ – looks almost like back on the ship, doesn’t it?

PhD student Elizabeth Pierce (Columbia University), sampling one of the ~15 million year old cores from Expedition 318. Elizabeth is part of the team of research from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, I collaborate with to understand the provenance of ice-rafted debris around Antarctica.

It is now nearly 3 month ago that we came back from our expedition to drill the Antarctic continental margin. In a few weeks many of the expedition participants will travel to the core repository in College Station (Texas, USA) to unpack the cores, we saw the last time three months ago, and take the samples for all our science projects. Then the real work begins !!!

Just in time for this exciting next phase of IODP expedition 318, the documentary about our expedition got completed. Enjoy !!!

It is now two weeks since I arrived back in the UK from IODP expedition 318 Wilkes Land - time to summarize our findings and bring this blog to a close.

During our two months expedition we drilled at seven sites close to, and on the Antarctic Wilkes Land continental shelf, at water depth ranging between 400 and 4000m. Despite severe weather and ice (berg) conditions, we managed to drill 3200m of sediments beneath the Antarctic sea floor, with an average core recovery of 53%. Together, the cores represent ~53 million years of Antarctic climate history. They tell the tale of an ice-free, warm greenhouse world, the first cooling around Antarctica, the onset and erosional consequences of the first Antarctic glaciers, and the subsequent dynamics of the waxing and waning Antarctic ice sheet, all the way to the thick, unprecedented ‘tree ring style’ records with seasonal resolution of the last deglaciation that began some 10,000 years ago.

We clearly have material in hand that will revolutionise your understanding of the tectonic evolution of the Australian and Antarctic plates as well as Cenozoic climate history around Antarctica, which of course has major global significance. We will all meet in June again to actually take the samples to start our various research programs. Watch out for the scientific results from one of the most spectacular IODP expeditions to date!

And last but not least: Here is the last episode of our weekly video report. The last report features the co-chief scientists, Carlota Escutia (Granada University, Spain) and Henk Brinkhuis (Utrecht University, Netherlands). A big thanks to the two of them for ‘orchestrating’ the science party, and making this a remarkable experience for all of us! A thanks also to staff scientist Adam Klaus, the IODP technicians, the ship’s crew, captain Terry, our ‘weather man’ Kjell, and our ‘ice man’ Diego, to make the expedition such a successful (and safe) operation.

And for the other scientists - well, we see each other again in College Station in June for our sampling party!

And here it comes - the ‘ocean man’ video featuring the ‘ocean man band’ with curator Chad Broyles, organic geochemist James Bendle, and the green guy (???). The partying crowd is made up by Expedition 318 participants (scientists, IODP staff, …). We had a really good time out at sea, and arrived on 8 March safe in the port of Hobart. I will post a summary of our expedition achievements as well as the final video episode in the next couple of weeks. All I need now is a few days of sleep …

It is officially done - the last core came on deck, the last samples were taken, and the last reports are now being written. Yesterday night we started our transit back to Hobart (Tasmania), where we will arrive next week. Everybody is tired, but happy about a tremendously successful expedition. We really deserve our beers in Hobart!

Enjoy below part six of the weekly video updates produced by Dan Brinkhuis (Zcene Moving Media Company). This week features paleontologist Catherine Stickley from the University of Trømso, Norway. The penguin TV actually took place in the chemistry lab !!!

A last weekly video will be finalized when we are back onshore, featuring the co-chief scientists. Stay tuned!

‘Core is on the floor’ is the what we hear through the intercom system on the ship, every time when a new piece of sediment floor comes up from the seafloor. What happens after the announcement is a highly streamlined sequence of steps. First the IODP technicians go out on the catwalk (see picture), where they put the core on racks, label it, and cut it in pieces.

The catwalk is where the core first arrives. Normally it is an open space, but since it is quite cold down here off Antarctica, they put up a nice little wall to give the technicians some shelter from the cold wind.

From there it goes inside the ship and is left alone for some hours to equilibrate. Then it gets put through a series of so-called track systems, where the physical properties of the sediment are measured. After this, the core is split into two halves – a working half and an archive half. The archive half goes to the sedimentologists, who take pictures of it and describe what type of sediment we found, what colour it has, and what the likely depositional environment was. The working half is used by the palaeomagnetists to measure the magnetic field, which helps us to figure out the age of the core. A complimentary way to find out about the age is to look at the palaeontology in the core (diatoms, radiolarian, dynoflagellates, foraminifera, nannofossil). This is done by another group of people on the ship. They prepare slides and then look at them through the microscope. Finally we, the geochemists, take a sample for determining the amount of carbonate in the core, as well as the elemental composition of the sediment. All this sampling happens on the ‘sampling table’ (see picture). Afterwards the cores are wrapped and stored away.

James Bendle (organic geochemist, Glasgow) during his sampling shift, taking samples for all other scientists from the core on the sampling table (photo credit: Christina Riesselmann).

We are currently drilling our last Site for this expedition. We are recovering a very nice looking record of the more recent past of Antarctica (i.e., the past few million years). Our last attempt to go to the shelf failed yesterday, as the ice is moving in for the winter. Hence the only thing left to do is to drill a bit further offshore. Soon we will start wrapping up all our analyses, finalize the reports we have to write, and pack things away for our return to shore. It has been a long cruise, but I could still stay out for longer. It is simply amazing how much cool science you can get done on the Joides Resolution with all its analytical capabilities, the drilling crew, the IODP technician, and thirty scientist, focusing on one single goal: to make this expedition a scientific success. And we succeeded big time!

Part FIVE of the weekly updates from the JOIDES Resolution, sailing for the Antarctic coast of Wilkes Land between January and March 2010. Our mission: exploring the climate history of Antarctica. This week features sedimentologist Rob Dunbar from Stanford University. Enjoy!

Below you can see a picture of our ship track on the Antarctic shelf over the past few days. The curly line is the result of quite difficult ice conditions with huge icebergs and some sea ice in the area where our targeted drill sites are. Earlier this week we had to sit out a storm, caused by a significant low pressure system going through the area. This was done away from the shelf, where there is only very little ice, making it a safer place to be in rough seas. On Tuesday we started the journey back to the continental shelf, to drill some more material that tells us about the transition from the Greenhouse world into the icehouse world. On the shelf this transition can be found in only a few hundred meters depth below the seafloor (ice advances and retreats over the past ~34 million years have scraped off the younger deposits from the shallow ocean floor). In contrast, at the deep water site where we drilled first, the Greenhouse-icehouse transition was down at ~900m below the seafloor.

Ship's track over the last few days.

Our ship’s track is such a wiggly line, as we had to find our way through a lot of ice. The captain and the ship’s crew are doing a fantastic job, in trying to get us back on site, but drilling on the shelf of Antarctica is not a trivial task. We are lucky that we recovered some amazing cores already, and we still hope to get some more. However, the weather window (it is summer down here at the moment) will close eventually, and most of our targeted drill sites will be covered with ice for the winter. But we have about two weeks of science time left before we will return to Hobart (Tasmania). Keep your fingers crossed that we not only get more wonderful sunny days with gorgeous icebergs, but that the icebergs stay far enough away from us so that we can continue our scientific mission and get more spectacular core material!

My colleagues Masao Iwai (Japan, paleontologist) and Masako Yamane (Japan, sedimentologist) enjoy the nice weather today. In the background you can see icebergs, which are grounded on the continental shelf, as well as the Antarctic ice sheet.

I have been writing a lot about the excitement of being at sea. This post will be dedicated to giving you some impression on how life aboard the ship (the Joides Resolution) feels like.

Below you can see a picture of the cabin I am sharing with one of my female colleagues. We are lucky in that we scored one of the biggest cabins with a private bathroom. For most other scientists the cabins are significantly smaller and the bathroom is shared with another cabin. I am sleeping in the lower bunk and find it quite comfortable. The only downside of our cabin is that we do not have a window! From the beginning of the expedition on I started getting into a routine of visiting the gym every other day. It is good enough equipped that everybody can find some of their favorite machines for workout. Moreover, we are very fortunate that we have a great Yoga teacher on board (Paleomagnetist Lisa Tauxe). She gives Yoga classes every other night at 1am, which is right after the end of my shift. I am not going every time, but it is the best thing to do after a tiring shift, and Lisa is simply fantastic in monitoring the different levels of abilities in the group and adjusting her program accordingly.

Our cabin - quite a lot of space for a ship!

The first trip after waking up in the morning is usually to the mess. The mess on a ship is the place where people eat – just like a cafeteria back home. Our mess is quite spacious and offers place for about 40 people to eat at the same time. There is a coffee machine, an ice machine, a fridge, a toaster, a microwave, soda machines, and a constant supply of cereals and deserts. Food is served four times a day by the galley (kitchen) personal: 5 – 7 am/pm and 11 – 1 am/pm. During these times the mess becomes the social hot spot of the ship, where besides eating also a lot of information exchange happens (just like in the real world). The quality of the food is reasonable, but by now we are out of fresh stuff, and the same dishes tend to reappear on the menu…

Mess hall - this is where we take all our meals.

Arguably one of the best thing about life on the ship is that we do not have to do our own laundry or cleaning of the cabins! We can leave laundry bags with dirty laundry outside our cabin, and some 12 hours later the bag comes back with clean and folded laundry – heaven for people like me who hate doing laundry. A big thank you to the stewards doing the work on the ship.