(from the Wilkes Land Prospectus)

IODP Expedition 323 (January-March 2009) will drill 5 sites between 200 and 1000 m deep in a continental shelf to abyssal plain transect offshore Wilkes Land. The aim is to obtain the sedimentary record of Antarctic glaciation and its relationships with global sea level, paleoclimate and paleoceanographic changes. This record includes critical periods in Earth climate evolution when the cryosphere formed and evolved to assume its present day configuration.

The Wilkes Land, located at the seaward termination of the largest East Antarctic subglacial basin, the Wilkes Basin, is a key region for the analysis of the long- and short-term behavior of the EAIS. The base of the portion of the EAIS draining through the Wilkes Basin is largely below sea level, suggesting that this portion of the EAIS is potentially less stable than the rest of the EAIS. The timing and mode of the onset of glaciation at the Wilkes Land continental margin is still unknown but is essential for providing age constraints for the models of EAIS development and changes in its volume. Moreover, detailed portrayal of the subsequent Cenozoic history and dynamics of the Antarctic glacial cycles at Wilkes Land will provide further constraints for model experiments and future predictions about EAIS stability.

In January 2009, the Scientific Team for the Wilkes Land Expedition will embark on the Joides Resolution in Wellington, New Zealand. The Scientific Team will consist of about 26 scientists representing the 22 countries contributing to the international Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP). The range of expertise of the Scientific Team will make possible to process the sediment cores as they are recovered in the state-of-the-art laboratories of the Joides Resolution, and to integrate the results in order to produce a scientific volume with the preliminary results of the Expedition by the time they disembark in Wellington the 22 March 2009. The Scientific Team will consist of students, junior and senior scientists, to train the new generation of Antarctic Scientists. Additionally, we aim at establishing “real-time telecommunications with science museums in Spain (other?), and schools. Our aim is to produce videos from the expedition that can be distributed to the public.

This figure shows drilling sites and profile locations. Primary sites are shown in red and all alternate sites are shown in blue.

I have been recently selected to participate on the IODP Wlkes Land expedition as a benthic foraminiferist. For my participation plan for the Expedition, I propose to develop high-resolution sequence stratigraphic and foraminiferal biofacies records from Eocene and Oligocene strata recovered at the shallow water and isotopic records from the deep-water Sites.

Previously, when I was an onboard scientist on ODP Leg 189, I developed a sequence stratigraphic record for the middle Eocene from Site 1171 (Pekar et al., 2005) by an integrated approach using lithofacies and benthic foraminiferal biofacies with chronostratigraphic data. This site contains an exceptional record of shallow marine sedimentation, permitting development of a high-resolution sequence stratigraphic framework that identified water depth changes and sequences and their bounding surfaces. I propose to carry out a similar study for the Wilkes Land Expedition. During pre-onset of glaciation (i.e., Eocene), deposition is presumed dominated by processes related to sea level changes. In contrast, during the onset of glaciation (late The objectives of this study fulfill one of the main goals of this expedition: to obtain a record of the onset of glaciation during the Eocene and across into the Oligocene.
The proposed project here would also provide a means to correlate the Eocene sections from the conjugate margins of the South Tasman Rise and Wilkes Land. This would represent an exceptional opportunity to study and compare the evolution of these two margins as Australia and Antarctica separated. It would also permit analysis of differences between the margins owing to the increasing influence by glacial conditions at Wilkes Land.