Collaborative Research: Historic Perspectives on Climate and Biogeography from Deep-sea Corals in the Drake Passage

极地海洋是深水形成的主要场所，对深海和大气之间的热量和碳交换至关重要。这个奖？从德雷克海峡的深海珊瑚看气候和生物地理的历史观点？将解决以下具体的研究问题：在最后一次冰期极大期和过去快速气候变化事件期间，南大洋的放射性碳含量是多少？以及在德雷克海峡和邻近的大陆架内，过去和现在冷水珊瑚分布的主要控制因素是什么？测试这些整体问题将使研究人员更好地了解南大洋的过程如何与数千年来的气候变化联系在一起。这个奖项是由美国国家科学基金会的南极地球科学项目资助的。美国极地项目办公室，南极分部。知识价值：深海珊瑚的骨骼在南大洋中是丰富的，可以使用u系列技术来确定年代，使它们成为海洋学历史的有用档案。通过配对u系列和放射性碳分析，获奖者可以重建过去海水的放射性碳含量，使他们能够解决上述研究问题。收集活的深海珊瑚以及环境数据将使他们能够解决上面提出的更广泛的生物地理学问题。获奖者是唯一有资格在各自的实验室中通过尖端技术回答这些问题的人，他们在2008年对该地区进行了初步的试点巡航，并展示了有希望的结果。更广泛的影响：社会相关性：拟议的古气候研究将在限制南大洋方面取得重大进展？具体来说，它应该有助于确定世界这一地区海洋环流变化速度的上限，这在这个气候变化的时代具有高度的社会意义。教育和推广（E/O）：这些活动分为四类：i)通过将本科生和博士后学生充分纳入研究项目，增加学生对极地研究的参与；ii)通过邮轮网站和校内讲座提供信息，促进K-12教学计划；iii)通过数据档案，如海山在线和海山生物地理网络，将收集到的数据提供给更广泛的研究界；iv)通过大众媒体采访等方式，接触到更多的公众。

Polar oceans are the main sites of deep-water formation and are critical to the exchange of heat and carbon between the deep ocean and the atmosphere. This award ?Historic perspectives on climate and biogeography from deep-sea corals in the Drake Passage? will address the following specific research questions: What was the radiocarbon content of the Southern Ocean during the last glacial maximum and during past rapid climate change events? and What are the major controls on the past and present distribution of cold-water corals within the Drake Passage and adjacent continental shelves? Testing these overall questions will allow the researchers to better understand how processes in the Southern Ocean are linked to climate change over millennia. This award is being funded by the Antarctic Earth Sciences Program of NSF?s Office of Polar Programs, Antarctic Division. INTELLECTUAL MERIT: The skeletons of deep-sea corals are abundant in the Southern Ocean, and can be dated using U-series techniques making them a useful archive of oceanographic history. By pairing U-series and radiocarbon analyses the awardees can reconstruct the radiocarbon content of seawater in the past, allowing them to address the research questions raised above. Collection of living deep-sea corals along with environmental data will allow them to address the broader biogeography questions posed above as well. The awardees are uniquely qualified to answer these questions in their respective labs via cutting edge technologies, and they have shown promising results from a preliminary pilot cruise to the area in 2008.BROADER IMPACTS: Societal Relevance: The proposed paleoclimate research will make significant advances toward constraining the Southern Ocean?s influence on global climate, specifically it should help set the bounds for the upper limits on how fast the ocean circulation might change in this region of the world, which is of high societal relevance in this era of changing climate. Education and Outreach (E/O): These activities are grouped into four categories: i) increasing student participation in polar research by fully integrating undergraduate through post-doctoral students into research programs; ii) promotion of K-12 teaching and learning programs by providing information via a cruise website and in-school talks, iii) making the data collected available to the wider research community via data archives such as Seamounts Online and the Seamount Biogeographic Network and iv) reaching a larger public audience through such venues as interviews in the popular media.