GEOLOGIC CLIMATE RECORDS

    UTIG researchers obtain geologic records of climate on annual, suborbital (10-to-100-year), orbital (1000 - to -10,000-year) and tectonic (greater than 100,000-year) time scales.

Active Projects
   * Depositional Cyclicity, Canterbury Basin
   * Gulf Intraslope Basins Project (GIB)
   * Holocene/Deglacial Abrupt Climate Change and Variability of the Western Pacific Warm Pool
   * Seismic Profiling of Rapidly Subsiding Reefs on Sabine Bank, Vanuatu: Preparing for a Future Opportunity to Drill Ancient Reefs Representing Off-Peak and Lowstand Sea Levels During MIS 2-5
   * Western Divide West Antarctic Ice Cores (WAISCORES) Site Selection

Previous Projects
   * Dynamics of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS)
   * Temperature History of the WPWP
   * Late Quaternary Climate Change and the ¹⁴C Timescale
   * Ice core research in West Antarctica (WAISCORES)
   * ODP Leg 150
   * ODP Leg 174A

    Donald Blankenship and David Morse are involved in the WAISCORES Project to select a site for an ice core to be drilled from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet starting in 2002. This ice core will provide a detailed, high-resolution record of the WAIS’s role in global climate change and in the Earth's climate history over a period of several thousand years.

    Jamie Austin, Craig Fulthorpe, and Hilary Olson study marine cores collected by the ODP and data from seismic surveys to decipher the record of sea-level fluctuations on time scales greater than 100,000 years.

    The PLATES Project, led by Lawrence Lawver and Ian Dalziel, reconstructs Earth's tectonic plates and geological environments as far back in geologic time as one billion years. PLATES' models provide a better understanding of how large-scale features like the Himalaya Mountains and oceanic gateways interact with the atmosphere and ocean circulation to influence climate.

    Fred Taylor is involved in two paleoclimate programs to document the temperature history in the Western Pacific Warm Pool region of the Pacific Ocean, an area that is critical to the Earth's climate and weather. One program involves analyzing cores drilled from living corals to obtain a record of climate extending back several hundred years; the other involves analyzing cores of fossil corals from uplifted reefs to obtain climate records for times back through the last glacial maximum about 22,000 years ago.