Ship drills for climate change secrets

Just off the coast of Timaru, a ship is drilling into the seabed – all for climate change research.

An international team of more than 30 scientists, including three from New Zealand, are on board the Joides Resolution, gathering information to determine the links between climate change and sea level.

It is the ship's first visit to New Zealand since 1998, and its expedition is part of the Integrated Ocean Drilling Programme, an international consortium of scientific organisations from 24 countries.

"The drill holes will go down to more than 1800m below the seabed," New Zealand GNS researcher and IODP coordinator Chris Hollis said.

"In fact, the hole drilled last week set a record for the drilling ship – drilling more than 1000m beneath the sea floor on the shallow continental shelf."

"Drill cores will collect a record of sediments and microscopic life, or micro-fossils, to show how the marine environment has changed over the last 30 million years," he said.

"It is important for our predictive models on climate change, because it helps us work out how changes in global temperature affect sea level through the waxing and waning of polar ice sheets.

Dr Hollis said climate change modelling had to take into account flow-on effects that could be precipitated from changes in temperature.

"There is a reason why we keep an eye on Greenland and the west Antarctic ice sheet. The melting of those ice sheets alone could precipitate a 10m rise in sea level."

The information would also help in the next stage of IPCC modelling on climate change, Dr Hollis said.

Although the information gathering had been continuing at a reasonable pace, the expedition had not been without its problem, he said.

It encountered some difficulty at the weekend when one of its very expensive down-hole logging tools got stuck 900m beneath the sea floor. After 36 hours of effort, the drilling team managed to free the tool and they are now working on their second drill site about 90 kilometres southeast of Timaru – 70km off the coast from Waimate.

"They have got a whole host of equipment on board to take samples and collect and analyse the data and, in fact, a lot of the stuff you wouldn't even find in the best laboratories on land," Dr Hollis said.

The ship will be off the coast of Canterbury over Christmas, before returning to Wellington on January 4.

- © Fairfax NZ News