Bethany Welke

My research involves using till units from three distinct areas in the Ross Embayment to provide a broad scale geochronologic survey of detrital minerals to provide greater insight into the bedrock beneath the East and West Antarctic ice sheets. This provenance study will also aid in the development of models that can accurately reproduce previous ice sheet configurations and predict future changes including ice flow paths. Ice rafted debris from the Ross Sea can be linked to till from East and West Antarctica to reconstruct ice flow paths (Licht et al., 2005) however, additional geochronological constraints are needed to better identify source areas. The objective of my project is to use U-Pb and (U-Th)/He ages of detrital zircons to identify signatures of East and West Antarctic derived ice and link them to offshore deposits.