Emperor penguins in the sea ice of East Antarctica (Image: Shutterstock)
Walid Ben Mansour, associate postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences in Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington at St. Louis, received a $ 191,601 grant from the National Science Foundation to determine the thermal and compositional structure of Antarctica by seismic, gravity. and topological and petrological modeling data. Ben Mansour’s co-researcher is Douglas A. Wiens, Robert S. Brookings ’distinguished professor of Earth and Planetary sciences in arts and sciences.
Ben Mansour
Global warming is not the only factor affecting the presence of ice sheets and ice fields on Earth. The interaction between the ice sheets and the solid Earth strongly influences the evolution of the glacial system and the rapid loss of ice mass in Antarctica and Greenland, as previous Wiens research has shown.
In this new project, Ben Mansour and Wiens will use the latest geophysical data sets from Antarctica, which are most sensitive to the physical state of the mantle (seismic velocity, gravity anomalies, topography) to estimate temperature variations in 3D up to 380 km deep. , as well as the average iron composition of the mantle throughout the continent.
Ben Mansour previously used a similar methodology to illuminate the lithosphere and sublitosphere in Africa. His research showed a good correlation between thermochemical structure and geological boundaries. For the new project, Ben Mansour and Wiens hope to identify these boundaries under East Antarctica, covered by a 2-4 km thick layer of ice.
As part of a broader research plan, Ben Mansour and Wiens will use the new Antarctic thermochemical model along with others from Africa, Australia, South America and India to present a complete picture of the evolution of the lithosphere since the breaking of the ancient supercontinent called Gondwana. and divided into the land masses we recognize today as continents.