Dr Stephen McCarron and (ICARUS) Irish Climate Analysis Research Units have secured up to €500,000 in funding from the HEA to significantly increase Palaeoclimate research facilities at NUIM. A new set of laboratory spaces will be provided by the grant including sediment core-logging equipment and rock crushing equipment for cosmogenic rock dating sample preparation.

The investment will add major new potential to the range of contributions Irish climate researchers can make to international research efforts to understand the past climates of the climatically sensitive north Atlantic region. By better constraining the behaviour of the last Irish Ice Sheet in particular, ICARUS hopes to inform debates on the rapidity of the last deglaciation/glacial Termination (~22,000 years ago). The environmental and geographical conditions at that time affecting the last Irish Ice Sheet, on and around the coastline of the Irish landmass, are possibly the best global analogue for the current conditions around the potentially unstable West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

The ICARUS analysis of marine sediment cores in particular, collected from the western Irish continental shelf, should allow a more detailed and complete picture of Irish Ice Sheet dynamics to be reconstructed across this critical palaeoclimatic period than has been possible before.