Posted: December 7, 2010
The article discusses John Goodge's, a professor of geological sciences at the University of Minnesota-Duluth, and Jeff Vervoort's, an isotope geochemist from Washington State University, research expedition in Antarctica. They are digging up and sending home samples of Antarctica crust, which is hidden below 8,000-12,000 ft of ice.
"Antarctica is bigger than the United States and Europe combined, but its geology is very poorly known. Why do we care about the geology of the Antarctic continent? Part of it is basic scientific curiosity, because we know from limited outcrop that parts of East Antarctica are as old as 3.8 billion years. It can tell us about the long evolution of continental crust formation as the earth had undergone chemical differentiation. Antarctica was a key piece in Pangea, Gondwana and Rodinia (huge supercontinents formed by the assembly of many of today’s familiar continents at roughly 250, 500 and 1,000 million years ago), and knowing more about its geologic architecture can help to refine the picture of global paleogeography as far back as 1 billion years ago. Lastly, because the polar ice cap and glaciers in Antarctica are critical to understanding past climate and ongoing processes of climate change, knowing more about the substrate for the earth’s largest ice cap and reservoir of fresh water will help to determine the stability and future fate of the ice sheet in the face of ongoing warming."
Obviously information like this is important if we are going to find solutions to the problems we are creating, or that may be naturally occuring on Earth today, such as global warming. Although there are some controversies facing global warming, researchers may be able to use these samples to determine more about the issue and how things may be in the future.
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