Drilling for Antarctic Cenozoic climate and tectonic history at Cape Roberts, southwestern Ross Sea

Since the early 1990s, the Cape Roberts Project has been working to document, through sediment drilling, the proximal record of Antarctic ice sheet history and climate for the southwestern part of the Ross Sea, Antarctica. It has also investigated the tectonic history of the Transantarctic Mountain range of the West Antarctic Rift system and its links to the separation of Australasia from Antarctica over the past 55 million years. The recovered sedimentary sequences and the information they contain provide a record of environmental conditions when global temperatures were similar to those proposed for the end of this century, a test for models of ice and climate behavior, and a better understanding of the tectonic evolution of the region.