Terry Wilson : My main research focus at Antarctica is studying tectonics, which is the study of the broad architecture of the surface of the earth and how the forces acting on it cause it to change shape.

Much of what we know about past climate actually comes from deep ocean basins. We have very few records that come from Antarctica where, essentially, the action was happening. Ice was advancing and retreating in response to these climate trends.

Basins are places where the surface goes down and that creates space to collect sedimentary layers. Those are the pages of the book that we use to reconstruct climate in the past. But, the basins are like the libraries; they hold the books. And so one of the main ways that I’ve contributed to Andrill is by carrying out geophysical surveys which are ship born surveys that we use sources to actually probe beneath the earth’s surface to find where there are sedimentary basins to figure out where to drill.

We were the first scientists to look at each core as it came out of the ground and make the first observations and measurements on it and worked directly with the drilling team as they extracted the core. I kind of think of it as watching the story unfold from the box seats.

Cristina Millan : We were there for twelve hours processing the core. The core comes up and after it’s cleaned up and measured it comes to Terry and I. First thing that we do with it, Terry has to log the core. My main job after that was done was the core is cut up into one-meter lengths and I have a machine called a core scanner. And I lay the core in there very carefully. It’s very fragile, sometimes breaks; and this machine has two rollers and it rolls and I take an image of the outside of the core. And so we basically did that with over twelve hundred meters of core. For us, it’s important to see the whole core. Because when we take an image of that core and we unroll it, we can print it out and see an unrolled image of that core.

You know, as scientists a lot of times we read these papers where all these scientists come together. I had never experienced first hand, how all these people, there were over fifty people down there working on this project, how all of these people from different countries come together and come to an agreement. And look at this core and every day science is being made. It was a great interaction. It was fun to talk to, you know, Europeans, I come from Europe also. There were Italians and Germans and, you know, I felt very comfortable with them.

Terry Wilson : It’s an amazing experience for students, but it’s equally amazing for those of us who are the leaders of the project because we get the different perspectives and also the different expertise that comes from gathering together the best scientists from this large pool, from all of these different countries to work together. It melded together both technology and science. And Andrill made a lot of firsts this first drilling season. It was the first time that we drilled from an ice shelf platform. So, the drill rig sat on the ice shelf with water beneath it and then extracted core from the rock below it. And we extracted the longest rock core that’s ever been obtained from Antarctica. From a historical point of view, drilling in Antarctica has been led by New Zealand researchers and they’ve been pioneering the actual methods that we use for drilling from ice as a platform. And this year alone, on the ice, of the around fifty people total that were working on the project, over ten of them were actually connected to OSU as either faculty, or students currently, as Ph.D. students in the past, or as post doctoral researchers with the Byrd Polar Research Center. So, it’s a pretty remarkable cohort of the project that actually came from Ohio State.