Four new PhD and one MSc student commencing their studies on the RICE record

Since March 2016 five new graduate students commenced their studies on the RICE records:

Hannah Brightley - MSc (New Zealand, Mar 2016)
Lukas Eling - PhD (Germany, Apr 2016)
Abhijith Ulayottil Venugopal - PhD (India, Apr 2016)
Dan Lowry - PhD (USA, Jul 2016)
Katelyn Johnson - PhD (USA, Aug 2016)

Please find more information on them and their projects under the RICE Team site

New Funding to correlate RICE climate reconstruction with the high resolution IODP-1357U marine sediment record!

Predicting a sea change: Antarctic ice-ocean interactions in a warming world
 
Nancy Bertler, Rob McKay, Nick Golledge, Lionel Carter, Rob Dunbar, Matt England and Howard Conway are awarded a prestigious Marsden Research Grant.
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During the Mid Pliocene, 3-5 million years ago, high carbon dioxide concentrations (400 parts per million) caused vulnerable margins of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets to collapse, raising global sea level by at least 10 m. In 2013, the Earth's atmosphere registered for the first time since then equally high atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. So, how and when will the ice sheets and the surrounding Southern Ocean respond? Increased wind-driven upwelling of deep ocean water onto the adjacent continental margin is suggested as the major driver to melt ice shelves and destabilise ice sheets, highlighting the complex atmosphere to ocean to ice interactions. This project will integrate data from two new, annually layered records of past climate conditions preserved in a coastal ice core (RICE) and a marine sediment (IODP-U1357) record. This will enable the reconstruction of concurrent changes in the atmosphere, ocean, and ice sheet through past warm periods and grounding line retreat. Supported by ocean / ice sheet model experiments, this will allow us to determine the response of the Antarctic ice sheets and the surrounding ocean with the aim to identify the key mechanisms and feedbacks to improve projections of Antarctica's response in the 21st Century. The three year project will commence in March 2016.