Canberra geologist helps advance global understanding of climate change

Associate professor White braved freezing temperatures and blizzards on the remote and tiny island of South Georgia in the South Atlantic ocean, collecting data on climate change. He and his colleagues launched their final report in London on Friday, which showed ice sheets surrounding the island south-east of South America had shrunk faster than previously believed.

Mr White said ice sheets around South Georgia had shrunk to a tenth of its original size since the last ice age, likely as a result of our planet's warming climate.

He said it would help future projections on the change to ice sheets across the planet, helping model sea level rises as a result of climate change.

"It gives us some basic information about how sensitive marine based ice sheets are to ocean warming, and a much better idea for where the thresholds are for other sheets including the Antarctics," Mr White said.

Mr White said his two-week stint on South Georgia was like living in a zoo, with a huge population of fur seals, penguins and other polar and sub-polar animal life.

"I'd often be woken up at four in the morning as a baby seal would come out of the ocean and cry for its mum," Mr White said.

"It's quite the privilege being able to go to some quite remote places and to look at things that are interesting and important to the world and just plain amazing to see."

Mr White would take 'cosmogenic exposure dating samples', testing chunks of rock for isotopes created by cosmic radiation.

Seeing the amount of isotopes, like aluminium or beryllium, in the rock showed scientists how long ago the rock was covered by ice.

"Basically as the ice sheet goes past the piece of bedrock it exposes that rock to cosmic rays and starts the clock," Mr White said.

"It really did rewrite our understanding of how the ice sheets on South Georgia have changed."

"The previous theory was they are more or less the same they are today."