ANDRILL pre-drilling workshop is Sept. 4-6 at UNL

Scientists and educators from the United States and partner nations will be in Lincoln Sept. 4-6 to prepare for the first Antarctic drilling season in the ANDRILL (ANtarctic geological DRILLing) program.

The ANDRILL McMurdo Ice Shelf Project Pre-drilling Workshop will bring nearly 40 scientists and four of the six educators chosen to participate in this year's drilling season to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln campus. They will meet in Morrill and Bessey halls to finalize plans for the October to early January McMurdo Ice Shelf Project, to be led by co-chief scientists Tim Naish of the Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences in New Zealand and Ross Powell of Northern Illinois University.

A second ANDRILL drilling season from October-December 2007, the Southern McMurdo Sound Project, will be led by co-chief scientists Fabio Florindo of Italy's National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology, and David Harwood, professor of geosciences at UNL and research director for ANDRILL's Science Management Office at UNL.

ANDRILL is a multinational collaboration involving 150 scientists from Germany, Italy, New Zealand and the United States. Its purpose is to recover sediment core samples from the McMurdo Sound region of Antarctica to develop a detailed history of the Antarctic climate and the expansion and contraction of the Ross Sea area's ice sheets and ice shelves over the past 20 million years.

Operations and logistics for ANDRILL are managed by Antarctica New Zealand. The scientific research is administered and coordinated through the ANDRILL Science Management Office, located at UNL. For more information, visit http://andrill.org.

CONTACT: David Harwood, Research Director, ANDRILL Science Management Office, (402) 472-6745