By Cristina Millan

Well, it’s been just under 10 months since my last posting but the thing is: I am back in Antarctica. Last year I spent three months here working on the ANDRILL Project (check here for last year’s amazing season). ANDRILL (ANtarctic DRILLing) is a multinational project involving four countries (US, New Zealand, Italy, and Germany) with the goal of recovering sediments from the sea floor. One of the aims of this project is to gain a better understanding of global climatic change, in which Antarctica plays a very important role. The structural geology group (to which I belong, together with three other colleagues) is also interested in the broader geologic history of the area where we are drilling: how and when did Antarctica separate from Gondwana? What geological forces took place to create things like the Transantarctic Mountains and nearby basins? How did these processes work and how are they related? When did it all happen? These are important questions geologist around the world study and try to answer, and I have been really lucky to get to do these studies in Antarctica. So I work with this large ANDRILL group and look for that hidden story hidden within the couple of thousand of meters of core we recovered last year and expect to recover this year

This year the ANDRILL rig, with its characteristic ‘sail’, sits near Ross Island, on the sea ice covering the Ross Sea. This location also gives its name to this year’s project: the ANDRILL Southern McMurdo Sound Project

Since we left the ice last January after our first season, the team met at conferences, workshops, and colleague’s institutions to share findings and data already coming out of last year’s core. We also prepared for the next season: the one that started October 3rd, 2007, when the first Andrill team members arrived in McMurdo. And so, here I am. It almost seems like we never left, though many things have changed….

Check www.andrill.org for science information, education and outreach resources and news related to the project I am working on.