Sea-floor Sediments Illuminate 53 Million Years of Climate History

[seemslikeadream]

http://www.physorg.com/news160410462.html

(PhysOrg.com) -- The Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) drillship JOIDES Resolution is returning to port in Honolulu this week after a two-month voyage to chart detailed climate history in the equatorial Pacific Ocean. The expedition was the first of two back-to-back voyages of a scientific project called Pacific Equatorial Age Transect (PEAT). It was the first international scientific drilling expedition after the JOIDES Resolution underwent a multi-year transformation into a 21st-century floating science laboratory.

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The PEAT expeditions are recovering a series of continuous historical records in sediments at a number of different geographic locations beneath the equatorial Pacific Ocean. The first research effort, called Expedition 320, took place March 5 through May 4, 2009; Expedition 321 will take place from May 5 through July 5, 2009.

Co-chief scientists of Expedition 320 were Heiko Palike of the University of Southampton, U.K., and Hiroshi Nishi of Hokkaido University in Japan. On Expedition 320, scientists obtained records from the present back in time to the warmest sustained "greenhouse" period on Earth, which took place around 53 million years ago.

Shipboard studies have revealed that changes in ocean acidification linked to climate change have a large and global impact on marine organisms.

"The sediments collected during this expedition offer an unprecedented window to the evolution of the tropical Pacific, one of the largest and most climatically important ocean regions on Earth," said Julie Morris, director of NSF's Division of Ocean Sciences.

[jimshoes]

1. It's amazing what they can find in

the sediments lain down over the ages. But why didn't they go a bit further and dig through the KT boundary and see if the irridium layer under the oceans is the same as on land? Just one more thing. I find this kind of stuff very interesting.