Scientific Ocean Drilling in the news

The climate warmed up almost as quickly 56 million years ago as it is doing now. When a huge amount of CO2 entered the atmosphere in a short period of time, it led to large-scale forest fires and erosion. Mei Nelissen, PhD candidate at NIOZ and UU, and her colleagues were able to see this very clearly in the layers of sediment drilled off the Norwegian coast. The research was published in PNAS on January 19.

Last summer, the Ocean Core Teacher-Researcher and Curriculum Experience (TRACX) gathered teachers from across the United States and abroad for a transformative week of research and collaboration at the Gulf Coast Repository (GCR) at Texas A&M University.

Rising ocean temperatures may play more of a role in melting ice sheets than global warming — with the worst effects experienced on the other side of the globe. A University of Leicester geoscientist has contributed to a new paper in Nature Geoscience, ‘Spatially variable response of Antarctica’s ice sheets to orbital forcing during the Pliocene’, that explores the complicated dynamics.

Sediments off Antarctica show that a jump of two to three degrees Celsius can accelerate ice loss and raise sea levels. In a new study, researchers traced how ocean heat and rising temperatures worked together in the past. Drill crews pulled long cores from the bottom of the Ross Sea, capturing layered mud that formed as ice advanced and retreated repeatedly.

The world’s coastlines depend, in part, on two glaciers most people have never heard of. Thwaites and Pine Island sit in West Antarctica, and together they act as corks holding back ice that could raise sea levels by several meters. Scientists have been watching them for decades, but the question that keeps everyone up at night is whether what’s happening now is the start of something much worse.

New research using drilling samples points to a widespread Miocene-age petroleum system in the eastern Nordic Seas that is similar to prolific producing basins offshore West and Central Africa. The study published this week on the Marine and Petroleum Geology journal analyzed results from the Ocean Drilling Program at Site 909 in the central Fram Strait and Site 985 in the Iceland Sea; International Ocean Discovery Program Expedition 396 at Site U1572 in the Vøring Plateau; exploration wells 6608/10-1 in the Mid-Norwegian margin; and exploration well 7316/5-1 in the southwestern Barents Sea.

Scientists have analysed lavas drilled from deep under the South Atlantic Ocean to understand how much CO₂ is captured within the rocks due to reactions between the rocks and ocean. The research, led by the University of Southampton, found that piles of lava rubble, formed due to erosion of seafloor mountains, form geological sponges for CO₂.