Million-Year-Old Bubbles May Unravel the Puzzle of the Ice Age

Posted on Jan 15, 2025 at 10:01 PM

An international research team has retrieved a 9,186-foot-long ice core from Antarctica, dating back 1.2 million years. The core, which is nearly as long as 25 soccer fields and six and a half times taller than the Empire State Building, records Earth's climate.

Particularly, Italy's Ca' Foscari University of Venice has collected a 3.2-foot (1-meter) core from Little Dome C, a harsh location 21 miles from the Concordia research station, and could provide insights into the planet's climate changes over time.

An Icy Turning Point

Researchers from 12 European scientific institutions have collected the core of the Earth's oldest ice during the fourth campaign of the Beyond EPICA — Oldest Ice project, funded by the European Commission.

Moreover, the project, which aimed to uncover links between climate and atmospheric greenhouse gases over the past 800,000 years, has now collected a deep ice core, marking a new milestone in the ongoing record of Earth's climate. The campaign took over 200 days.

Notably, the EPICA core studies revealed a 100,000-year cycle of cold and warmer glacial periods, contradicting marine sediments' 41,000-year glacial periods before 1 million years ago. The Beyond EPICA project aims to find older ice using radar surveys to explain this shift.

Frank Wilhelms, a principal investigator at Göttingen University and the Alfred Wegener Institute, explains that radio echo-sounding technologies helped team members locate ice containing a time capsule.

In addition, Dr. Robert Mulvaney, a glaciologist and paleoclimatologist at the British Antarctic Survey, emphasised the importance of a Goldilocks site with an ice thick enough for a well-resolved climate record.

Remarkably, little Dome C, located at an altitude of 10,498 feet (3,200 meters), is a high-altitude Antarctic plateau with numerous challenges. The team had to prevent drill failures and ensure progress through the ice layers, which can hold up to 13,000 years of climate data, according to Julien Westhoff, chief scientist and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Copenhagen.

Prehistoric Ice: Insights

Researchers have discovered a 688-foot core above bedrock containing heavily deformed, mixed, and refrozen old ice of unknown origin, testing theories on its refrozen beneath the ice sheet and determining the last ice-free period in Antarctica.

The Mid-Pleistocene Transition, spanning 1.2 million to 900,000 years ago, marked a significant shift in Earth's glacial cycles. 

Besides, a 2023 study in the Journal Science suggests that the Mid-Pleistocene Transition led to longer, more intense ice ages, causing a drop in temperature and dry climate, and causing a global population drop to 1,280 reproducing individuals between 930,000 and 813,000 years ago.

Bubbles in the air

Ice cores, made up of snowfall layers, contain air bubbles and particles that can reveal Earth's temperature and atmosphere shifts, aiding scientists in predicting future climate changes and understanding the planet's response to greenhouse gases.

Furthermore, Arctic ice cores, like Rosetta Stones, offer crucial insights into climate change dynamics by revealing temperature and carbon dioxide levels' interaction. Jim White, despite not participating in ice core retrieval, emphasizes the cores' importance.

Eventually, researchers will analyse ice core slices at the site and transport them to Europe for multiyear research. They plan to measure gas and dust particle concentrations within the ice. Also, the Beyond EPICA project and international associations are searching for older ice for longer climate records.

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