The Ice Age mystery could be solved for the first time after scientists discovered what is probably the world’s oldest ice, dating back a whopping 1.2m years ago.
Working at temperatures of -35C for weeks a team of scientists extracted a 1.7 mile-long cylinder, or core, of ice – longer than eight Eiffel Towers end-to-end or six and a half times taller than the Empire State Building.
The sample extended so deep that it reached the bedrock beneath the Antarctic Ice Sheet.
The core is a “time machine” that captures “an extraordinary archive of Earth’s climate,” said Carlo Barbante, coordinator of the Beyond EPICA, or European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica.
Preserved within the ice are reportedly “ancient air bubbles” which could reveal how greenhouse gases, atmospheric chemicals and dust levels have changed.
Their work could help unravel one of the major mysteries in our planet’s climate history – what happened 900,000-1.2 million years ago when glacial cycles were disrupted and some researchers say our ancestors came close to extinction.
Scientists hope the research could now unlock when glacial cycles changed which is one of the major mysteries in our planet’s climate history.
“The air bubbles trapped within the ice core provide a direct snapshot of past atmospheric composition, including greenhouse gas concentrations like carbon dioxide and methane,” Barbante said via email, according to CNN Science.
She added: “By analyzing these, we can reconstruct how Earth’s climate responded to changes in climate forcing factors, such as solar radiation, volcanic activity, and orbital variations.
“This data helps us understand the intricate relationship between greenhouse gases and global temperature over hundreds of thousands of years and now down to 1.2 million year(s) and hopefully beyond.”
The team had a “nail-biting last few days” as they were able to drill even deeper than anticipated from radar data, says Dr Robert Mulvaney, an ice core scientist at British Antarctic Survey.
The core was collected from Little Dome C most extreme locations on the planet. The site is 21 miles from the Italian-French Concordia research station.
