Antarctic
Using ice-core information of the past to face climate change of the present and the future. To design effective mitigation and adaptation strategies to the current man-made climate change and improve our ability to predict future climate changes, we need to carefully study the past. The Antarctic ice sheet contains a unique record of the Earth’s climate history. The air bubbles embedded in the ice preserve a record of the Earth’s atmosphere through time. The EU-funded Beyond EPICA project set up a camp at Little Dome C in East Antarctica, with the aim to obtain quantitative, high-resolution ice-core information on climate and environmental changes over the last 1.5 million years. This includes a major transition in the rhythm and intensity of the ice age cycles. Its investigation is vital to understand the processes governing our climate system.
SO-CHIC (Southern Ocean Carbon and Heat Impact on Climate): To understand and quantify variability of heat and carbon budgets in the Southern Ocean through an investigation of the key processes controlling exchanges between the atmosphere, ocean and sea ice using a combination of observational and modelling approaches.
TiPACCs is a European Horizon 2020 project investigating the probability of sudden and large changes in the sea-level contribution from the Antarctic Ice Sheet that would result from passing tipping points in the marginal seas and at the grounding lines of the floating ice shelves that fringe the ice sheet.
