DANGER DML

Deciphering the evolution of an East ANtarctic drainage system over the last Glacial cycle in westERn Dronning Maud Land

01/01/2023 to 31/12/2024

An understanding of Antarctic ice-sheet behaviour is critical for
evaluating the role of the polar ice caps in the climate system and for
constraining the global impact of sea-level rise in a future warming
climate. Critical for assessing the potential future behaviour of the
East Antarctic Ice Sheet is to document how it changed over the last
glacial cycle (~ 0 – 115 thousand years ago) and to identify areas that
were vulnerable to these changes. However, there is a lack of suitable
observations and models that can realistically simulate East
Antarctica's ice-sheet evolution. This deficiency will be addressed in
DANGER DML. The overall goal of the project is to better understand
how a major sector of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet reacted to icesheet
changes during the last glacial cycle by applying a novel
structural analysis method for internal layers in the ice to reconstruct
ice-flow patterns of the past. This enables a new way to investigate
the past ice-dynamic behaviour of a major drainage basin in Dronning
Maud Land (Jutulstraumen and its neighboring catchments) over the
last glacial cycle and in particular the transition from the Last Glacial
Maximum to the Holocene.