Drilling Antarctica: What ice can tell us about our past and the future

ITV News

6 days ago

The oldest ice core ever to be drilled has arrived in the UK for scientists to start analysing, as ITV News Science Correspondent Martin Stew reports
Words by ITV News Senior Producer, Rhiannon Hopley
In the freezing temperatures of Antarctica, the nearly 3km thick ice contains a perfectly preserved record of our planet's history.
As part of an ambitious project to unlock these secrets, European scientists have drilled down into the ice and extracted a core which is 2.8km long.
This long core has been pulled out from the middle of the Antarctic ice sheet and scientists think the deepest part could be more than 1.5million years old.
To get it out, scientists had to bore down carefully, pulling the ice out bit by bit on spring loaders as the hole is filled with a liquid so it does not refreeze.
The ice core has been split into parts and sent to labs across Europe including the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge.
Scientists will melt the ice and analyse its contents, with the results expected to give us new information about Earth's history.
That's because tiny bubbles of air locked inside the ice have been frozen in time.
The bubbles in the younger ice are bigger, but in the older ice, the bubbles have been squeezed down for such a long time that it looks like glass.
Ice Core Drilling Engineer, James Veale explained: "When you get this deep, the pressure from the ice is so great, those air bubbles get smaller and smaller and compressed until you get to the very bottom and you can't see them at all."
Some of these bubbles have been trapped in stasis for over a million years.
They are so old that these tiny bits of perfectly preserved air would have been breathed in by giant mammoths when they roamed the Earth.
The scientists melt the cores and run them through machines, looking for three main things: how much carbon dioxide was in the atmosphere at the time, the temperature and any impurities in the ice.
In the ice core, impurities can show when there have been volcanic eruptions or other big historical events, including the atomic bombs dropped on Japan.
In fact it is so accurate, scientists can see the start of the industrial revolution and even the moment that lead was taken out of petrol.
The last long ice core to be drilled out went back 800,000 years. It helped map out how the earth's temperature and carbon cycles have fluctuated.
Head of ice core research at British Antarctic Survey, Dr Liz Thomas, and her team will be slowly melting the ice for 15 hours a day for the next seven weeks so they can analyse the gases in the ice.
The Earth does fluctuate between ice ages and higher temperature eras, but the ice core has revealed that there has never been this much CO2 put into the atmosphere this quickly in the entire 800,000 year record. With the new core, scientists will be able to nearly double the length of current records. It is hoped it will reveal new data to explain why the Earth's temperature cycle changed from ice ages every 40,000 years to every 100,000 years. It will also provise more evidence for how carbon dioxide levels affect our planet's temperature and conditions as looking this far back into the past may just help reveal our future.