Scientists in East Antarctica are about to get a peek into the Earth’s climate history dating back 1.2 million years thanks to freshly drilled ice core samples. The cores just might provide us with reams of data on the fluctuations in the Earth’s climate, including tons of information on periods of extreme cooling that impacted early humans.
Ice core samples are little frozen time capsules. They preserve ancient atmospheric gases like carbon dioxide and methane, water isotopes, and a wide variety of particles and bacteria. All that information provides researchers with a reconstruction of past climates so we can develop a fuller picture of how the planet reacts to dramatic shifts in climate patterns.
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Every meter-long segment of the ice core, which is essentially a long solid tube of ice, contains up to 13,000 years of history compressed into an ice cube. This particular court, taken from the Little Dome C extraction site in East Antarctica, will give us a snapshot of the climate from somewhere between 900,000 to 1.2 million years ago, a period when the Earth’s climate was undergoing a massive transition marked by the lengthening of glacial cycles.
It’s a stretch where ice ages happened in cycles of 40,000 years before shifting the cycles of happening every 120,000 years. Scientists don’t know what caused that shift, but they’re hoping these new Antarctic ice cores will shed some light on this long-standing mystery.
By better understanding the wild climate shifts of the past, we might better understand the human role in it all. And the effects high concentrations of greenhouse gases have on the planet. The planet clearly has its own natural climate rhythms. Maybe these ice cores will help us figure out just how much humans have disrupted them.
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