Scientists have retrieved an extraordinary ice core from Antarctica’s remote Little Dome C region, stretching almost the length of 25 soccer fields. The 9,186-foot-long core contains layers that shed light on a dramatic chapter in Earth’s climate history, dating back 1.2 million years.
The core’s depth allows researchers to investigate how volcanic activity, Earth’s orbital cycles, and solar fluctuations affected global temperatures over millennia. Tiny bubbles of air trapped in the ice preserve past levels of gases like carbon dioxide and methane, providing clues about ancient environmental shifts.
The newly recovered ice records may help clarify whether severe climate conditions had an outsized impact on human survival during a pivotal time period around 930,000 to 813,000 years ago. If supported by the data, these findings could improve climate prediction models by revealing the timing of ancient changes.
The team is eager to examine the compressed bands at the core’s bottom, which may hold exceptionally old and possibly deformed ice. These findings could test long-standing hypotheses about when major ice sheets first expanded across Antarctica and potentially reveal sections from the pre-Quaternary Period (2.58 million years ago or more) that are hidden below.
The ice core is part of the Beyond EPICA project, which aims to uncover continuous climate records in remote areas of Antarctica. With future work focusing on other regions where ancient ice could be retrieved, researchers hope to unlock deeper insights into Earth’s complex forces and balance them against solar radiation, volcanic eruptions, and shifting atmospheric currents.
The study has been published in the Astrophysics Data System, and experts are optimistic about the potential discoveries that will emerge from this groundbreaking research.
Source: https://www.earth.com/news/scientists-build-a-time-machine-by-drilling-an-ice-core-2-miles-deep-in-antarctica