A team of OU researchers traveled to Antarctica in search of clues to the Earth’s climate system earlier this year.

Gerilyn Soreghan, OU geology professor, said reconstruction of the Earth’s past climate is a key path to understanding the Earth’s climate in general, as well as projecting future climate changes.

Soreghan, research team member, said she believes comparing more modern systems in a range of different climates will help support her hypothesis that ice existed at the equator some 300 million years ago during the late Paleozoic Period.

To research her hypothesis, Soreghan said a proposal was submitted to the National Science Foundation to study modern sediments formed in “end-member” climates.

Soreghan said although the proposal was ranked highly, it was not ranked highly enough for full funding. Instead the National Science Foundation countered with an offer to fund a very small pilot project in Antarctica.

“Although disappointed that we did not acquire funding for the entire project initially, we were — and are — very excited to commence work on a portion of it, with the hope of discovering some additional data to strengthen our hypothesis and ultimately resubmit a stronger proposal to complete the work,” Soreghan said.

Two graduate students, Kristen Marra and Allison Stumpf, flew to New Zealand on Dec. 28, Soreghan said.

Marra said she prepared for the trip using suggestions made by the United States Antarctic Program, which supplies almost all gear needed to work in an extreme field environment.

“We definitely arrived with more additional gear and clothing than anyone would ever need,” Marra said.

The trip to the McMurdo Sound, Antarctica, took about five hours. There they pinpointed the glaciers where they would take water and sediment samples. When they were ready, a helicopter dropped them in the Dry Valleys, and they began collecting samples in one of the smallest rivers in Wright Valley, an OU press release stated.

The team then moved to the Onyx River, the largest river in the valley. Sampling here was more successful as the river flows roughly six weeks during the summer, the press release stated.

The water samples taken from the river showed nonrandom patterns, which is a good sign, Soreghan said.

She said the experience was exhilarating, otherworldly, fascinating, breathtaking and blindingly bright; however, the journey was physically demanding.

“I realized it would be physically demanding, but had not fully appreciated the rigors of the true field experience in the Dry Valleys,” Soreghan said.

The team had to set up 100-pound tents and weighing them down in anticipation of katabolic wind storms, consuming food that was typically at least two to three years old and sometimes nearly a decade past expiration, hiking 12 kilometers in a 20 degree wind chill and seeing rocks carved by the wind into intricate and unimaginable shapes, she said.

Stumpf said the team spent a total of 12 days in the field, seven days in Wright Valley, and five days in Taylor Valley.

“Each day we would hike up to the front of a predetermined glacier and then sample down its drainage,” Stumpf said. “We collected rock, sediment and water samples along the stream drainage.”

The samples will be arriving sometime in April, she said.

Soreghan said she hopes their research increases their understanding of how rocks weather in an extreme polar desert, and how they can detect such conditions in rocks ranging back hundreds of millions — and even billions — of years into the Earth’s past.

“In a sense, we are opening Earth’s laboratory book and discovering the results of various past planetary experiments,” Soreghan said.

Although the trip was strenuous, Marra said it was the experience of a lifetime.

“This was by far my most extreme outdoor experience,” Marra said. “I thoroughly enjoyed the entire process, from researching the geology of the Dry Valleys to learning the appropriate clothing to wear to cooking pizza on a camp stove in the middle of the Frozen Continent.”