UNL to Research Global Warming

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln will share a $13 million grant from the National Science Foundation for ongoing Antarctic research on global warming.

A consortium of five universities headed by UNL and Northern Illinois University in DeKalb will share the money.

The money will be disbursed over five years and is part of an international effort to probe deeper beneath the polar ice.

The grant will be administered by the Antarctic Geological Drilling Office headquartered at UNL.

In all, the program is backed by more than $30 million in funding, including $10 million in previous and ongoing national agreements to support operations and nearly $8 million from other countries to support research.

In 2006 and 2007, program scientists will use a powerful new drilling system to recover rock cores from beneath the ice.

By studying the cores, scientists will be able to develop a detailed history of the Antarctic climate and the expansion and contraction of the area's ice sheets over the past 20 million years.

Other U.S. members of the consortium Florida State University, the Ohio State University and the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. The international half of the venture will include scientists from New Zealand, Italy and Germany.

"The Antarctic is like a global thermostat," said Northern Illinois University geologist Ross Powell.

"The region is showing it can be extremely sensitive to climate change with the massive ice sheet interacting with the world's atmosphere and oceans to help maintain the world's current temperature distribution."

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