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Victoria University Antarctic Research Expedition Science and Logistics Reports 2005-06: VUWAE 50

a. Context of the research

a. Context of the research

Unprecedented changes are occurring in the Earth's climate. The 1990's were the warmest decade in the last 2000 years and average global temperature is projected to rise between 1.4°C and 5.8°C by 2100 [IPCC 2001]. Although the scientific evidence of global warming is now widely regarded as incontrovertible, predicting regional impacts is proving more problematic. Especially, conclusions of the Southern Hemisphere record are limited by the sparseness of available proxy data at present [Mann and Jones 2003].

While meteorological records from instrumental and remote sensing data display the large intercontinental climate variability, they series are insufficient to infer trends or to understand the forcing, which renders prediction difficult [Jones et al. 1999; Mann and Jones 2003]. The long ice core records from the Antarctic interior and Greenland revolutionised our understanding of global climate and showed for the first time the occurrence of RCE (Rapid Climate Change Events) (for review e.g. Mayweski and White [2002]). To understand the drivers and consequences of climate change on timescales important to humans, a new focus of ice core work is now moving towards the acquisition of 'local' ice cores that overlap with and extend the instrumental records of the last 40 years back over the last several thousand years.

This has been a key motivation behind the US-led International Transantarctic Scientific Expedition (ITASE) of which New Zealand is a member. The NZ ITASE objective is to recover a series of ice cores from glaciers along a 14 degree latitudinal transect of the climatically sensitive Victoria Land coastline to establish the drivers and feedback mechanism of the Ross Sea climate variability [Bertler and 54 others 2005; Bertler et al. 2004a; Bertler et al. 2005a; Bertler et al. 2004b; Bertler et al. 2005b; Patterson et al. 2005]. Furthermore, the ice core records will provide a baseline for climate change in the region that will contribute to the NZ-led multinational Latitudinal Gradient Project as well as providing a reference record for the NZ-led ANDRILL objective to obtain a high-resolution sedimentary archive of Ross Ice Shelf stability.