STILLWATER — An Oklahoma State University professor and two
students will spend six weeks this spring braving Antarctic snow
and wind to study sea level changes over the past 10,000 years.
Geology professor Alex Simms will choose two graduate students
to help collect beach deposits that will be dated to shed light
into how ice sheets respond to sea level and climate change. The
project is funded by a $200,000 grant from the National Science
Foundation. "We will be trying to determine how much ice was on
Antarctica during the last ice age by determining how much the
continent has rebounded from the melting of the ice,” he said.
Simms and two former students traveled in 2007 to the Antarctic
coast to test rocks using a dating technique called optically
stimulated luminescence. The technique was developed by OSU
physics professor Regina DeWitt, who will help complete the
research when Simms returns to campus. For the upcoming trip,
set to begin March 8, Simms and his team will fly to southern
Chile, then board t