User:Example/Articles/Richard Levy (NZ glacial stratigrapher and paleoclimatologist)

Richard Levy is a New Zealand glacial stratigrapher and paleoclimatologist with expertise in microfossil analysis. As a principal scientist at GNS Science he has been involved in international and New Zealand environmental research programmes focussing on the evolution of the Earth's climate and has had extensive experience in scientific drilling, leading major projects, including the ANtarctic geological DRILLing (ANDRILL) Program in Antarctica.

Career and associations
After co-authoring a guide with Tim Naish for the ANDRILL project in 2006, Levy was tasked with the planning, delivery and troubleshooting of the programme. From 2008, Levy has been a principal scientist at GNS Science with a specific role as Environment and Climate Theme Leader. Between 2007 and 2015, he was Project Leader for the Global Change Programme that aimed "to advance understanding of past climate and environmental change in the New Zealand region, Southern Ocean and Antarctica...[and]... reduce uncertainties surrounding future climate change, and create value for New Zealand industry through applied paleontology and isotope geoscience." Levy was Programme Leader of the Past Antarctic Climate and Future Implications (PACaFI - K001), a GNS project, from 2010 to 2018, and Director of the Joint Antarctic Research Institute (2013-2017). Since 2016 he has been the  National Representative, Executive Committee, International Continental Scientific Drilling Program. In 2018, Levy along with Tim Naish, became a leader of the NZ Searise project. As an associate professor he is a staff member at the Antarctic Research Centre, Victoria University of Wellington and works with the Antarctic Science Platform on Project 1 - Antarctic Ice Dynamics.

ANDRILL drilling programme
The ANDRILL programme was an international effort involving scientists from Germany, Italy, New Zealand and the United States and had the key objectives of investigating "Antarctica's role in global environmental change over the past 65 million years at various scales of age resolution...[with]... new stratigraphic records from Antarctica...[enhancing the]... ability to understand Antarctica’s potential response to future global changes."

In 2007 the ANDRILL team drilled to a depth of 1138.54 metres in the Southern McMurdo Sound in Antarctica and recovered sedimentary rock samples that showed a record of the last 13 million years of "glacial and climatic variation of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and Ross Sea region." Levy contributed to a journal article in 2007 which summarised the results of the project and concluded it was likely environmental changes in Antarctic ice volume had contributed significantly to sea levels and ocean circulation. This geologic record of the relatively recent past provided knowledge of how ice sheets, ice shelves and sea ice responded to warming and cooling events millions of years ago and enabled informed predictions about possible future scenarios as a result of climate change. Levy has noted that changes in Antarctica due to the earth getting warmer and melting the ice would affect sea levels and the climate around the coastal regions and other geologists working on the team agreed that fossilised evidence could show that approximately 34 million years ago Antarctica was not frozen.

In 2010 Levy was part of an international consortium of scientists who extended the earlier work of the ANDRILL project and aimed to "investigate past Antarctic climates and understand the behaviour of ice sheets under a range of climate scenarios." During preparations for the project, Levy said [it was] "a continuation of previous ANDRILL projects and takes us further back in time to periods when global temperatures were about 6 degrees Celsius warmer than today." Frank Rack from the University of Nebraska] who also worked on the team, explained that by drilling into an earlier time, it would be possible to record the transition of Antarctica from being ice-free about 40 million years ago, to the creation of the ice sheet, [which would] "allow us to do is go back in time and look at a warmer interval of Earth history with higher concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and reduced ice in Antarctica."

Part of the research carried out with ANDRILL involved establishing how Southern Ocean phytoplankton (diatoms)communities, which are an important part of the carbon cycle, responded to major environmental disturbance. Levy was a part of the team that developed a model to reconstruct how diatom begin as a new species, become extinct and then re-create or turnover, possibly due to climate change. This study found that in the last 15 million years there had been five turnovers of diatom in times of growth in the Antarctic ice sheet and its expansion that was likely to be due alternating periods of warmth in the climate being followed by glaciation. The model enabled informed predictions of the effect of environmental change on this marine microflora, and other ecosystems that might be vulnerable to climate change.

NZ Searise programme
This 5-year research programme funded by the New Zealand Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (NZMBIE) has the goal of the enabling more accurate estimates of future sea levels on New Zealand coastlines by building knowledge of the possible impact of polar ice sheets and "vertical land movements and changes in sea-surface height" on these.