Harmonies of Ice and Past Climate Change: Antarctic Paleoclimate, SCAR and Treaty Successes

Summary

The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) as science partner of the Antarctic Treaty has in the past decade orchestrated several key Antarctic research “players”. One of these is the Antarctic Climate Evolution (ACE) Scientific Research Program. ACE investigates the layers of sediment deposited around the Antarctic margin to reveal the history of the Antarctic Ice Sheet, which is a key temperament of the Earth’s climate system. The principal instruments used by ACE are seismic-reflection and rock-drilling data along with paleoclimate models guided and tested by these data. Understanding Antarctic’s past symphonies of climate and ice enable us to understand what to expect in the future as Antarctica’s ice melts.Conducting the paleoclimate players began in 1989 under ACE’s predecessor, the Antarctic Offshore Stratigraphy project (ANTOSTRAT) at a time when discord reverberated in geopolitical and geoscience movements due to the potential for hydrocarbon and mineral exploitation of Antarctica. As a prelude to the implementation of the Protocol on Environmental Protection, in 1991 ANTOSTRAT geoscientists from the international multichannel seismic-reflection (MCS) data community crafted the Antarctic Seismic Data Library System for Cooperative Research (SDLS). The researchers thoughtfully scripted the SDLS guidelines by which all MCS data (i.e., the stratigraphical “music scores”) were to be made available to all science-community players to facilitate and promote use of MCS data for research, not commerce. The consensus statement, with data-sharing guidelines, from the SDLS composers was incorporated into the Treaty as ATCM Recommendation XVI-12.Over the past 18 years, international players in the geoscience community have recorded over 350,000 km of MCS data valued at more than $350 million dollars and 84% of the data due at the SDLS have been submitted. The SDLS in turn has performed as a library, rather than a data bank, to support major works in the form of paleoclimate research projects under ANTOSTRAT, ACE and now within the international biological and other science communities. The SDLS through the carefully scripted sharing of data has successfully supported the Treaty’s geopolitical theme of preserving Antarctica as a continent for science. In this way, the SDLS has facilitated extensive and continuing harmonious collaboration in paleoclimate and related research of Antarctica’s continental margins and surrounding ocean basins.A major key for success, for the Treaty and science, has been cooperation in sharing data. The challenges for the future will be to ensure that seismic surveys and scientific drilling can continue and that these data are openly shared, as exemplified by the SDLS and general tenets of the Treaty. Gathering such data will sharply augment prior successes in deciphering the long history of Antarctic Ice Sheet and linked sea-level modulations, to accurately anticipate future changes.

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