I went to Antarctica with ANDRILL in October, November, and December 2007 as part of the ANDRILL Research Immersion for Science Educators (ARISE) team. I spent 2 months at McMurdo Station, Antarctica. I spent ten days camping on the sea ice as part of a seismic survey, and I visited the South Pole for twelve hours.

Part of my project in Antarctica involved the creation of educational software. I am using Google Earth for this, and am starting to release various data sets in Google Earth. This is a work-in-progress and you will see updates to this thread as I release new data. Currently, flight paths, ARISE biographies, videos, and ANDRILL news stories are available. Updates will include geo-tagged blog posts, photographs, photo overlays, data overlays, drill core locations, and more.

For more details about my trip in particular, please visit http://pace.edgcm.columbia.edu/

For more details about ANDRILL, read below or visit http://ANDRILL.org/

ANDRILL (ANtarctic geological DRILLing) is a multinational collaboration comprised of more than 200 scientists, students, and educators from five nations (Germany, Italy, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States) to recover stratigraphic records from the Antarctic margin using Cape Roberts Project (CRP) technology. The chief objective is to drill back in time to recover a history of paleoenvironmental changes that will guide our understanding of how fast, how large, and how frequent were glacial and interglacial changes in the Antarctica region. Future scenarios of global warming require guidance and constraint from past history that will reveal potential timing frequency and site of future changes.

Specific science objectives of the ANDRILL include:

• obtain high-resolution sediment cores that record major glacial events and transitional periods over the past 40 million years;
  
• determine orbital and sub-orbital glacio-climatic fluctuations that vary on 100,000, 40,000, and 20,000 year cycles
  
• obtain a refined record of the onset and development of the East Antarctic ice sheet (EAIS) 40 million years ago
  
• identify how the Antarctic region responded to past events of global warmth
  
• derive a detailed history of Antarctic Holocene environmental change at the end of the last glaciation
  
• and test global linkages between climate changes in the Northern and Southern hemispheres
  

Operations and logistics for ANDRILL are managed by Antarctica New Zealand. The scientific research is administered and coordinated through the ANDRILL Science Management Office, located at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.