These ancient ice cores are more than a million years in the making
:: Cambridge, England
This week, these cylinder ice samples arrived in the UK for climate analysis, more than a million years after they captured some of the Earth's atmosphere at the time.
Dr Liz Thomas leads the Ice Cores team at the British Antarctic Survey at this cold laboratory in Cambridge.
"So this is a really exciting project to work on because we really are exploring a completely unknown time in our history and what we're hoping is we're going to unlock all these amazing secrets."
:: This Earth
:: BAS
The ice core was drilled from a depth of 1.7 miles in the East Antarctic Peninsula…
:: PNRA:IPEV
:: Little Dome C, Antarctica
…before it was sawed into carefully labelled segments and shipped to Europe.
It's expected to hold a climate record stretching back over 1.5 million years, nearly doubling the current 800,000-year ice core record.
A key objective is to understand a massive shift in Earth's glacial-interglacial cycles - that's the recurring shift from warm to cold climates and back - that's occurred over the past million years.
Thomas says that could help us predict future climate responses to rising greenhouse gas levels.
'During that time there's evidence to suggest that the ice sheets were actually smaller, sea levels were potentially higher and CO2 similar to today. So it's a really interesting potential analogue for our future climate."
Ice cores capture direct evidence of past atmospheric conditions through trapped air bubbles.
:: Continuous Flow Analysis
Those will be analysed as they are released from the ice as it is slowly melted in a process called
Continuous Flow Analysis.
The findings will offer the first continuous environmental reconstructions spanning 1.5 million years.
:: PNRA:IPEV
That will shed light on the link between atmospheric CO2 and climate during a previously uncharted period.
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