At an extremely remote Antarctic outpost, scientists have unearthed a pristine sample of our planet’s history.
It is an ice core 2800 meters, or about 2.7 miles long. But it’s not just the length that is so important. The ice contains some preserved air pockets on Earth 1.2 million years ago, if not more. Previous ice cores provided direct evidence of our planet’s climate and environment as far back as 800,000 years ago.
So this is a giant leap. The team drilled so deep that they reached the bottom of the continent.
“We have marked a historic moment for climate and environmental science,” Carlo Barbante, a polar scientist and coordinator of the ice core campaign called “Beyond EPICA – Oldest Ice,” said in a statement.
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An international group of researchers has excavated the ice at Little Dome C Field Camp in Antarctica, located 3,233 meters above sea level. They sent radar to the subsurface and used computer models of the ice flow to determine where this ancient ice was likely to be. And they were right.
This was no easy task. Atop the Antarctic Plateau, summers average minus 35 degrees Celsius or minus 31 degrees Fahrenheit.
The location of the Little Dome C research base in Antarctica.
The location of the Little Dome C research base in Antarctica. Credit: Beyond EPICA/EU
Ice core drilled during the recent Beyond EPICA – Oldest Ice expedition.
Ice core drilled during the recent Beyond EPICA – Oldest Ice expedition. Credit: Scoto © PNRA/IPEV
Although paleoclimatologists, who investigate Earth’s past climate, have reliable methods to indirectly gauge our planet’s deep past—using proxies such as fossilized shells and compounds produced by algae—direct evidence, via direct air, is scientific of inestimable value. For example, previous ice cores have shown that carbon dioxide levels in Earth’s current atmosphere have skyrocketed – they are the highest in about 800,000 years. It is irrefutable proof of Earth’s past.
However, scientists expect this even older ice core to reveal secrets about a period called the Mid-Pleistocene Transition, which lasted about 900,000 to 1.2 million years ago. Mysteriously, the intervals between glacial cycles – when the ice sheets expanded and then retreated over much of the continents – have slowed considerably, from 41,000 years to 100,000 years.
“The reasons behind this shift remain one of the enduring mysteries of climate science, which this project aims to unravel,” the drilling campaign, which was coordinated by the Institute of Polar Sciences of Italy’s National Research Council, said in a statement.
Now the drilling is over. But the campaign to safely transport the ice back to laboratories and then scrutinize this million-year-old atmosphere has begun.
“The precious ice cores extracted during this campaign will be transported back to Europe on board the icebreaker Laura Bassi, maintaining the cold chain of minus 50 degrees Celsius, a significant challenge for the logistics of the project,” explains Gianluca Bianchi Fasani, head of the project, said. from ENEA logistics (National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development) for the Beyond EPICA expedition.
These historic ice cores will travel in ‘specialized cold containers’ around the world, far from the depths of their Antarctic home.
