Description du projet
Utiliser les informations des carottes de glace d’hier pour lutter contre le changement climatique d’aujourd’hui et de demain
Afin de concevoir des stratégies efficaces d’atténuation et d’adaptation au changement climatique actuel d’origine anthropique et de renforcer notre capacité à prévoir les changements climatiques à venir, nous devons étudier attentivement le passé. La calotte glaciaire de l’Antarctique recèle des vestiges uniques de l’histoire climatique de la Terre. Les bulles d’air prises au piège dans la glace conservent des traces de l’atmosphère de la Terre au fil du temps. Le projet Beyond EPICA, financé par l’UE, a installé un camp au Little Dome C dans l’Est-Antarctique, en vue d’obtenir des informations quantitatives et à haute résolution des carottes de glace relatives aux changements climatiques et environnementaux qui ont eu lieu ces dernières 1,5 million d’années. Ces changements comprennent une importante transition dans le rythme et l’intensité du cycle des périodes glaciaires. Son étude est d’une importance capitale si l’on souhaite comprendre les processus qui régissent notre système climatique.
Objectif
To better constrain the long-term response of Earth's climate system to continuing greenhouse gas emissions, it is essential to turn to the past. A key advance would be to understand the shift in Earth's climate response to orbital forcing during the 'Mid-Pleistocene transition' [MPT, 900,000 (900 kyr) to 1.2 million years (1.2 Myr) ago], when a dominant 40 kyr cyclicity gave way to the current 100 kyr period. It is critical to understand the role of forcing factors and especially of greenhouse gases in this transition. Unravelling such key linkages between the carbon cycle, ice sheets, atmosphere and ocean behaviour is vital, assisting society to design an effective mitigation and adaptation strategy for climate change. Only ice cores contain direct and quantitative information about past climate forcing and atmospheric responses. However, the longest (EPICA) ice core record available to date covers only the last 800 kyr. The RIA Topic LC-CLA-08-2018 empowers the European ice core community to perform such an oldest ice core drilling and the project 'Beyond EPICA' is taking on this unique challenge and opportunity. The overarching scientific objective driving 'Beyond EPICA' is to obtain quantitative, high-resolution ice- core information on climate and environmental changes over the last 1.5 Myr. The cause and effect relationship that led to the enigmatic MPT change in the climate system is not understood yet, as important information on global changes in the climate system is still missing. Most of this information, including the phasing of these changes in the Earth System can only be derived from a continuous ice core from Antarctica covering the last 1.5 Myr. This proposal uses the planning derived during the recent BE-OI CSA, and offers an excellent team (the only team globally that could at present accept the challenge of the call), underpinned by excellent infrastructure and capacity, and is currently ensuring it has an excellent location for the core.
Champ scientifique
Programme(s)
Régime de financement
RIA - Research and Innovation actionCoordinateur
00185 Roma
Italie