CoolinG oveR thE VicToria LAnd: resolving the Ross Sea response to continental climate change during the last two millennia

A survey of the current literature dealing with paleoclimate records of the last 2 millennia (2k y) in Antarctica reveals that our knowledge about short-term climate variability in this region largely relays on ice cores. Despite the extraordinary information gained from continental climate archives, how the
Southern Ocean changed over the same period remains elusive because of the paucity of marine records.
GRETA proposes to fill this knowledge gap by investigating the ocean response to a cooling event recorded over the Victoria Land (ca 1.3-1.9 ky CE). Specifically, we will reconstruct the sea ice dynamics (shelf sea ice and fast ice) and water mass properties (sea surface temperature, water mass circulation, upwelling) in the Ross Sea during this abrupt cooling event using marine sediment archives of the last 2ky. We will merge the information gained from the marine realm with ice core and model data to shed new insights into the submillennial variability of atmosphere-ocean interactions.