Million-Year-Old Bubbles May Solve Ice Age Mysteries

What is probably the world’s oldest ice, dating back 1.2 million years, has been dug deep inside Antarctica.

Working in temperatures of -35C, a team of scientists carved a 2.8km-long cyclinder, or core, out of the ice – taller than eight Eiffel Towers.

Suspended within the ice are ancient air bubbles that scientists hope will help solve an enduring mystery about our planet’s climate history.

European scientists worked in the Antarctic for four summers, racing against seven countries to be the first to reach the rock beneath the frozen continent.

Their work could help unravel a major mystery of our planet’s climate history – what happened 900,000-1.2 million years ago when glacial cycles were disrupted and Some researchers say that our ancestors were close to extinction..

“This is an amazing achievement,” says Professor Carlo Barbante of Venice’s Ca’ Foscari University, who coordinated the research.

“You have a piece of ice in your hand that’s a million years old. Sometimes you see layers of ash coming from volcanic eruptions. You see little bubbles inside, some air bubbles that are like ours. The ancestors breathed a million years ago,” he says. .

The team was led by the Italian Institute of Polar Sciences and included 10 European countries.

He had to transport the drilling equipment, laboratories and camp 40 km from the nearest research base by snowmobile.

The drilling site, called Little Dome Sea, is on the Antarctic Plateau in the east of the continent, at an altitude of about 3000 meters.

Ice cores are important to scientists’ understanding of how our climate is changing.

They trap air bubbles and particles that show levels of greenhouse gas emissions and temperature changes that help scientists project how climate conditions have changed over time.

Data from other ice cores, including those named Epica, helped scientists conclude that the current rise in temperatures linked to greenhouse gas emissions is due to humans burning fossil fuels.

But scientists wanted to go further back in time.

Now with the project Beyond Epica: The Oldest Ice they’ve possibly dated another 400,000 years.

“Our future has a lot to do with the past. We look to the past to better understand how the climate works and how we can project it into the future,” says Professor Barbante. are

Dr Robert Mulvaney, an ice core scientist at the British Antarctic Survey, says the team had to “bite their nails in the last few days” because they were able to drill deeper than expected from the radar data.

The core was slowly extracted from the ice sheet using drill machinery and the scientists carefully cleaned the ice using cloth.

It is now being cut into one meter pieces for transport by boat to Antarctica at -50C.

The pieces will eventually reach the freezers of several European institutions, including the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, where scientists will begin their analysis.

Experts want to understand what happened in a period from 900,000 to 1.2 million years ago called the Mid-Pleistocene Transition.

At this time, the length of the cycle between the cold glacial and warm interglacials changed from 41,000 years to 100,000 years. But scientists have never understood why.

This is the period when, according to some theories, the ancestors of modern humans became almost extinct, with perhaps only 1,000 individuals remaining.

Professor Barbante explains that scientists don’t know if there is a link between this near-extinction and climate, but it shows that it is an unusual period that needs to be better understood.

“What they will find is anyone’s guess, but it will undoubtedly widen our window on our planet’s past,” Professor Jory Rojelj, from Imperial College London, told BBC News.

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