Sediment Core Team Will Seek Polar Ice History - BBC

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"An international team of scientists is heading for the Arctic to extract cores from sediments deep below the sea bed. The team, the Arctic Coring Expedition (Acex), is part of a larger worldwide effort, the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program, which researches ocean basins.

Acex will use three icebreakers as it tries to take cores from the Lomonosov Ridge between Siberia and Greenland. It says its findings will help science to work out how long the Arctic sea ice, now in retreat, has persisted. The Lomonosov Ridge, 1,500km long, rises to 800m below sea level and is topped by 450m of layered sediments.

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The expedition sails from the Norwegian port of Tromso on 8 August, and once in position can expect a narrow window of about 35 days of clement weather before winter sets in. From early August Acex's logbook with reports and images will be available online at http://www.iodp.de/. Over the past 30 years scientists have found the Arctic sea ice has thinned from an average of roughly 3.1 to 1.8 metres. The area it covers has shrunk by 5%, about the size of France and Germany combined."

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3774051.stm