Introduction to Cenozoic Antarctic glacial history

Abstract

Fluctuations in size of the Antarctic Ice Sheet (AIS), a feature of the southern high latitudes for at least the last 35 million years, have been one of the major driving forces of changes in global sea level and climate through the Cenozoic Era. Under the prospect of a warming climate (IPCC, 2007), it is important to assess the past and future stability of the cryosphere, particularly after ice core records identified a direct link between variations in CO2 concentration in the atmosphere and palaeotemperatures. This special issue of Global and Planetary Change developed largely from contributions presented at the EGU meeting in Vienna, Austria (http://meetings.copernicus.org/egu2008/; 13–18 April, 2008), and at the International Geological Congress (IGC) Conference in Oslo, Norway (www.33igc.org/; 6–14 August, 2008) where we organised sessions designed to investigate the many orders and scales of variation of Antarctic ice sheets and palaeoclimate from Antarctic and Subantarctic records, from outcrop studies, deep sea drilling, continental margin drilling and seismic investigations, permafrost and ice core drilling. This special issue of Global and Planetary Change continues a series of related special issues and a book (Florindo et al., 2003, 2005; Barrett et al., 2006; Florindo et al., 2008; Florindo and Siegert, 2009), all of which are linked to the Antarctic Climate Evolution (ACE) project. ACE is an initiative of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) to investigate the climate and glacial history of Antarctica by linking climate and ice sheet modelling studies with terrestrial and marine geological and geophysical evidence of past changes (www.scar.org/researchgroups/geoscience/ace; http://www. ace.scar.org). Over the coming years, ACE will pursue a broad range of objectives to better comprehend past Antarctic changes through organisation of workshops and publication of special issues, allowing the dissemination of geological data and numerical modelling to a wide audience.