Scientists recover ice dating back over a million years
The ice core — drilled from a depth of 2,800 metres in the East Antarctic Peninsula — is expected to hold a climate record stretching back over 1.5 million years.
The recovery nearly doubles the current 800,000-year ice core record.
"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," Liz Thomas, head of the Ice Cores team at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) in Cambridge, said.
The ice core will undergo analysis over the coming years at BAS and other European laboratories.
Scientists aim to unlock insights into Earth's climate evolution, focusing on greenhouse gas concentrations, atmospheric temperatures, wind patterns, and sea ice extent.
A key objective is to understand why Earth's glacial-interglacial cycles shifted from 41,000 to 100,000 years about 1 million years ago.
This gives scientists context for predicting future climate responses to rising greenhouse gas levels.
Ice cores capture direct evidence of past atmospheric conditions through trapped air bubbles, which 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 shed light on the link between atmospheric CO2 and climate during a previously uncharted period.
Funded by the European Commission, Beyond EPICA involves 12 institutions across 10 European countries.
Reuters
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This may have favoured the evolution of more bizarre behaviours and body structures because there was less competition. "The animals that did survive that extinction event were basically free to experiment with all sorts of different modes of life." While the Mirasaura reptile isn't a precursor to the dinosaurs, its existence suggests that other Triassic creatures could also have had strange features that haven't survived fossilisation. "Because soft tissue is so seldom preserved, we are getting an incomplete picture of the past almost inevitably," Dr Poropat said.
