Paleoclimate Research on West Antarctic Glaciation Published by University of Bremen and RWTH in Science Advances

Led by the University of Bremen, RWTH paleoclimate researcher Professor Thorsten Bauersachs and colleagues have now published their results on the glaciation of West Antarctica in the journal Science Advances.

It has been more than 30 million years since West Antarctica was last largely ice-free. In the last 30 million years, however, it has been extensively glaciated. Professor Thorsten Bauersachs and an international team from a wide range of disciplines, led by Professor Cornelia Spiegel from the University of Bremen, have now investigated what the West Antarctic looked like before this glaciation and what conditions led to it. Their findings have now been published in the journal Science Advances, which is published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Since January 2024, Professor Thorsten Bauersachs has been head of RWTH’s Institute for Organic Biogeochemistry in Geo-Systems. His specialty is organic geochemistry. By using organic compounds, so-called temperature proxies, he is able to reconstruct temperature trends in the Earth’s history.

The study now published deals with the reconstruction of the environmental conditions of West Antarctica, which more than 30 million years ago resembled a temperate swamp environment. The researchers’ work aims to gain a better understanding of the factors that influenced the glaciation of Antarctica and what effect this had on the global climate and sea level fluctuations.

“We can now understand when West Antarctica was last ice-free, how quickly the climate and glaciation in West Antarctica have changed and how the Antarctic system works,” explains Bauersachs. The researchers distinguish between East and West Antarctica, as the majority of Antarctic ice loss occurs in the west of the continent. Why this is the case and what happens when the ice in West Antarctica melts is also the subject of their research.

Thorsten Bauersachs is investigating special lipids produced by cyanobacteria, also known as blue-green algae. In their composition, these bacteria adapt to the prevailing water temperature. Deposited in sediments, they allow conclusions to be drawn millions of years later – in this case about the temperature of West Antarctica at the transition from the Eocene to the Oligocene.

The sediment cores required for the study were obtained in 2017 during the “PS 104” expedition with the ice breaker Polarstern, the research vessel of the Federal Republic of Germany operated by the Alfred Wegener Institute, in the Amundsen Sea in West Antarctica.