Expedition 363 West Pacific Warm Pool: planktonic foraminifer biostratigraphy and the evolution of Pulleniatina

这笔赠款支持英国科学家保罗·皮尔逊教授参加国际海洋发现计划的第363次考察，该计划计划研究过去1500万年来“印度-太平洋暖池”的历史。这包括他在船上（海上2个月）和考察后科学研究的费用。热带西太平洋和印度洋的大部分地区的海面温度超过28摄氏度。该地区被称为印度-太平洋暖池（IPWP），是全球大气环流和水文循环的基础。随着全球变暖，IPWP正在加剧，但对其可能的未来进行建模具有挑战性。n363号探险队的目标是研究它在过去1500万年的温度和气候历史，包括从冰期到间冰期的气候周期，以及回到全球温暖的中新世时代。了解它过去的历史将有助于确定它目前的温度是否接近可能的最高值，或者全球变暖是否会在未来导致更大的加剧。皮尔逊教授是一位研究名为南极有孔虫的微观化石的专家。他将研究在研究期间该区域海洋浮游生物与气候变化和海平面波动的关系的演变情况，气候变化和海平面波动对陆地和浅海的分布以及洋流模式产生了重大影响。有孔虫也用于确定钻探沉积物的年龄（称为生物地层学），并为其他探险科学家提供高质量的南极有孔虫生物地层学将是该项目的主要特点之一。此外，特别关注有孔虫的进化谱系，称为Pulleniatina，它在地层工作中具有相当大的未开发潜力，也是一组浮游生物详细物种形成和灭绝的案例研究。这一群体的研究将有利于他们所表现出的巨大人口和不同的形态，因为像蜗牛一样，他们可以是左手或右手，通过时间和空间的卷曲模式是非常复杂的，可能非常有信息量。

This grant supports the participation of UK scientists Professor Paul Pearson in Expedition 363 of the International Ocean Discovery Program which plans to study the history of the 'Indo-Pacific Warm Pool' over the last 15 million years. It includes costs to cover his time while on board ship (2 months at sea) and post-expedition scientific study.Sea surface temperatures exceed 28oC across a huge area of the tropical western Pacific and Indian Oceans. Known as the Indo-Pacific Warm Pool (IPWP), this area is fundamental to the global atmospheric circulation and hydrologic cycle. The IPWP is intensifying with global warming, but modelling its likely future is challenging. Expedition n363 aims to study its temperature and climatic history over the past 15 million years, including through glacial to interglacial climate cycles and back to the globally warm Miocene epoch. Understanding its past history will help determine if its current temperature is near to its likely maximum or if global warming can cause much greater intensification in the future.Professor Pearson is a specialist in the study of microscopic fossils called planktonic foraminifera. He will study the evolution of the ocean plankton in the region over the study period, in relation to climatic change and sea level fluctuations which greatly affect the distribution of land masses and shallow seas and hence ocean current patterns. The foraminifera are also used to determine the age of the sediments drilled (called biostratigraphy) and providing other expedition scientists with a high quality planktonic foraminifer biostratigraphy will be one of the main features of this project. In additional there is a particular focus on an evolutionary lineage of foraminifera called Pulleniatina which has considerable untapped potential for stratigraphic work and also as a case study in the detailed speciation and extinction of a group of plankton. Study of this group will be facilitated by the large populations and varying morphology exhibited by them and because, like snails, they can be left or right handed and the pattern of coiling through time and across space is highly complex and potentially very informative.