Latest news with #Antarctic
eNCA
7 hours ago
- Science
- eNCA
From Antarctica to Brussels, hunting climate clues in old ice
BRUSSELS - In a small, refrigerated room at a Brussels university, parka-wearing scientists chop up Antarctic ice cores tens of thousands of years old in search of clues to our planet's changing climate. Trapped inside the cylindrical icicles are tiny air bubbles that can provide a snapshot of what the earth's atmosphere looked like back then. "We want to know a lot about the climates of the past because we can use it as an analogy for what can happen in the future," said Harry Zekollari, a glaciologist at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). Zekollari was part of a team of four that headed to the white continent in November on a mission to find some of the world's oldest ice -- without breaking the bank. Ice dating back millions of years can be found deep inside Antarctica, close to the South Pole, buried under kilometres of fresher ice and snow. But that's hard to reach and expeditions to drill it out are expensive. A recent EU-funded mission that brought back some 1.2-million-year-old samples came with a total price tag of around 11 million euros (around $12.8 million). To cut costs, the team from VUB and the nearby Universite Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) used satellite data and other clues to find areas where ancient ice might be more accessible. - Blue ice - AFP | Nicolas TUCAT Just like the water it is made of, ice flows towards the coast -- albeit slowly, explained Maaike Izeboud, a remote sensing specialist at VUB. And when the flow hits an obstacle, say a ridge or mountain, bottom layers can be pushed up closer to the surface. In a few rare spots, weather conditions like heavy winds prevent the formation of snow cover -- leaving thick layers of ice exposed. Named after their colouration, which contrasts with the whiteness of the rest of the continent, these account for only about one percent of Antarctica territory. "Blue ice areas are very special," said Izeboud. Her team zeroed in on a blue ice stretch lying about 2,300 meters above sea level, around 60 kilometres from Belgium's Princess Elisabeth Antarctica Research Station. Some old meteorites had been previously found there -- a hint that the surrounding ice is also old, the researchers explained. A container camp was set up and after a few weeks of measurements, drilling, and frozen meals, in January the team came back with 15 ice cores totalling about 60 meters in length. These were then shipped from South Africa to Belgium, where they arrived in late June. Inside a stocky cement ULB building in the Belgian capital, they are now being cut into smaller pieces to then be shipped to specialised labs in France and China for dating. Zekollari said the team hopes some of the samples, which were taken at shallow depths of about 10 meters, will be confirmed to be about 100,000 years old. - Climate 'treasure hunt' - This would allow them to go back and dig a few hundred meters deeper in the same spot for the big prize. AFP | Nicolas TUCAT "It's like a treasure hunt," Zekollari, 36, said, comparing their work to drawing a map for "Indiana Jones". "We're trying to cross the good spot on the map... and in one and a half years, we'll go back and we'll drill there," he said. "We're dreaming a bit, but we hope to get maybe three, four, five-million-year-old ice." Such ice could provide crucial input to climatologists studying the effects of global warming. Climate projections and models are calibrated using existing data on past temperatures and greenhouse gases in the atmosphere -- but the puzzle has some missing pieces. By the end of the century temperatures could reach levels similar to those the planet last experienced between 2.6 and 3.3 million years ago, said Etienne Legrain, 29, a paleo-climatologist at ULB. But currently there is little data on what CO2 levels were back then -- a key metric to understand how much further warming we could expect. "We don't know the link between CO2 concentration and temperature in a climate warmer than that of today," Legrain said. His team hopes to find it trapped inside some very old ice. "The air bubbles are the atmosphere of the past," he said. "It's really like magic when you feel it."
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Unique 1.5m year-old ice to be melted to unlock mystery
An ice core that may be older than 1.5 million years has arrived in the UK where scientists will melt it to unlock vital information about Earth's climate. The glassy cylinder is the planet's oldest ice and was drilled from deep inside the Antarctic ice sheet. Frozen inside is thousands of years of new information that scientists say could "revolutionise" what we know about climate change. BBC News went inside the -23C freezer room at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge to see the precious boxes of ice. "This is a completely unknown period of our Earth's history," says Dr Liz Thomas, head of ice core research at the British Antarctic Survey. Red warning lights flash above the door, and inside there is an emergency escape hatch into a tunnel in case something went wrong. The rules say we could only go inside for 15 minutes at a time, wearing padded overalls, boots, hats and gloves. Our camera's electronic shutter froze shut and our hair started to crackle as it turned icy. On a worktop next to stacked boxes of ice, Dr Thomas points out the oldest cores that could be 1.5 million years old. They shine and are so clear we can see our hands through them. For seven weeks, the team will slowly melt the hard-won ice, releasing ancient dust, volcanic ash, and even tiny marine algae called diatoms that were locked inside when water turned to ice. These materials can tell scientists about wind patterns, temperature, and sea levels more than a million years ago. Tubes will feed the liquid into machines in a lab next door that is one of the only places in the world that can do this science. It was a huge multinational effort to extract the ice cores in Antarctica, at a cost of millions. The ice was chopped into 1m blocks and transported by boat and then in a cold van to Cambridge. Engineer James Veal helped to extract the ice close to the Concordia base in eastern Antarctica. "To hold that in my carefully gloved hands and be very careful not to drop the sections - it was an amazing feeling," he says. Two institutions in Germany and Switzerland also have received cross-sections of the 2.8km core. The teams could find evidence of a period of time more than 800,000 years ago when carbon dioxide concentrations may have been naturally as high or even higher than they are now, according to Dr Thomas. This could help them understand what will happen in our future as our planet responds to warming gases trapped in our atmosphere. "Our climate system has been through so many different changes that we really need to be able to go back in time to understand these different processes and different tipping points," she says. The difference between today and previous eras with high greenhouse gases is that now humans have caused the rapid rise in warming gases in the last 150 years. That is taking us into unchartered territory, but the scientists hope that the record of our planet's environmental history locked in the ice could give us some guidance. The team will identify chemical isotopes in the liquid that could tell us the wind patterns, temperatures, and rainfall for a period of time between 800,000 and up to 1.5 million years ago or possibly more. They will use an instrument called an inductively couple plasma mass spectrometer (ICPMS) to measure over 20 elements and trace metals. That includes rare earth elements, sea salts and marine elements, as well as indicators of past volcanic eruptions. The work will help scientists understand a mysterious change called the Mid-Pleistocene Transition 800,000 to 1.2 million years ago when the planet's glacial cycles suddenly changed. The transition from warmer eras to cold glacial eras, when ice covered a lot more of Earth, had been every 41,000 years but it suddenly switched to 100,000 years. The cause of this shift is one of the "most exciting unsolved questions" in climate science, according to Dr Thomas. The cores may have evidence of a time when sea levels were much higher than they are now and when the vast Antarctic ice sheets were smaller. The presence of dust in the ice will help them understand how the ice sheets shrunk and contributed to sea level rise - something that is a major concern this century. Million year-old bubbles could solve ice age mystery Solve the daily Crossword
Sydney Morning Herald
2 days ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
The verdict on Hilton's first property in Tasmania
My 33-square-metre, seventh-floor deluxe room is most notable for its floor-to-ceiling windows, angled in such a way that the room and the bed, placed enchantingly close to the window, feel almost cantilevered over Macquarie Street. The spacious bathroom features a rain shower and Crabtree and Evelyn toiletries, and panoramic photos of local scenes run like banners above the bed heads – in my room, a shot of Sydney Hobart yachts crossing the finish line. My room is water-view, looking out over historic Battery Point with glimpses of the cruise port and the Antarctic icebreaker ship RSV Nuyina – it's Hobart's maritime existence in a glance. Food + drink Under the watch of Nathan Chilcott, former executive chef at Hobart's waterfront Mures, the light-filled Leatherwood is the hotel's most attractive space. The menu is staunchly Tasmanian, from local abalone and scallops to Clover lamb and Cape Grim beef. It's worth pulling up a stool at the attached bar, with its wide selection of local beer and wines, to watch city life roll past through the slit windows. Out + about It's a distinctive feature of Hobart and the DoubleTree's location that you can be on the fringe of the city and yet still at its heart. My room stares down into St David's Park, the green gateway into Salamanca's restaurants, bars and market, with the boat-filled waterfront just beyond. A trio of Hobart's finest restaurants – Fico, Dier Makr, Pitzi – are within a two-block radius of the hotel. The verdict While adding nothing distinctly unique to Hobart's hotel scene, the DoubleTree is well positioned and strong on the city's star quality: views. Essentials Rooms from $205 a night. Ten accessible rooms, including five connected to an adjacent room for guests travelling with a support person. 179 Macquarie Street, Hobart. See
The Age
2 days ago
- The Age
The verdict on Hilton's first property in Tasmania
My 33-square-metre, seventh-floor deluxe room is most notable for its floor-to-ceiling windows, angled in such a way that the room and the bed, placed enchantingly close to the window, feel almost cantilevered over Macquarie Street. The spacious bathroom features a rain shower and Crabtree and Evelyn toiletries, and panoramic photos of local scenes run like banners above the bed heads – in my room, a shot of Sydney Hobart yachts crossing the finish line. My room is water-view, looking out over historic Battery Point with glimpses of the cruise port and the Antarctic icebreaker ship RSV Nuyina – it's Hobart's maritime existence in a glance. Food + drink Under the watch of Nathan Chilcott, former executive chef at Hobart's waterfront Mures, the light-filled Leatherwood is the hotel's most attractive space. The menu is staunchly Tasmanian, from local abalone and scallops to Clover lamb and Cape Grim beef. It's worth pulling up a stool at the attached bar, with its wide selection of local beer and wines, to watch city life roll past through the slit windows. Out + about It's a distinctive feature of Hobart and the DoubleTree's location that you can be on the fringe of the city and yet still at its heart. My room stares down into St David's Park, the green gateway into Salamanca's restaurants, bars and market, with the boat-filled waterfront just beyond. A trio of Hobart's finest restaurants – Fico, Dier Makr, Pitzi – are within a two-block radius of the hotel. The verdict While adding nothing distinctly unique to Hobart's hotel scene, the DoubleTree is well positioned and strong on the city's star quality: views. Essentials Rooms from $205 a night. Ten accessible rooms, including five connected to an adjacent room for guests travelling with a support person. 179 Macquarie Street, Hobart. See
Observer
2 days ago
- Science
- Observer
Scientists hunt ancient ice for climate clues
UMBERTO BACCHI In a small, refrigerated room at a Brussels university, parka-wearing scientists chop up Antarctic ice cores tens of thousands of years old in search of clues to our planet's changing climate. Trapped inside the cylindrical icicles are tiny air bubbles that can provide a snapshot of what the earth's atmosphere looked like back then. "We want to know a lot about the climates of the past because we can use it as an analogy for what can happen in the future", said Harry Zekollari, a glaciologist at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). Zekollari was part of a team of four that headed to the white continent in November on a mission to find some of the world's oldest ice — without breaking the bank. Ice dating back millions of years can be found deep inside Antarctica, close to the South Pole, buried under kilometres of fresher ice and snow. But that's hard to reach and expeditions to drill it out are expensive. A recent EU-funded mission that brought back some 1.2-million-year-old samples came with a total price tag of around $12.8 million. To cut costs, the team from VUB and the nearby Universite Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) used satellite data and other clues to find areas where ancient ice might be more accessible. Belgian scientists holds blue ice samples in a laboratory in Brussels. - AFP BLUE ICE Just like the water it is made of, ice flows towards the coast — albeit slowly, explained Maaike Izeboud, a remote sensing specialist at VUB. And when the flow hits an obstacle, say a ridge or mountain, bottom layers can be pushed up closer to the surface. In a few rare spots, weather conditions like heavy winds prevent the formation of snow cover — leaving thick layers of ice exposed. Named after their colouration, which contrasts with the whiteness of the rest of the continent, these account for only about one per cent of Antarctica territory. "Blue ice areas are very special", said Izeboud. Her team zeroed in on a blue ice stretch lying about 2,300 metres above sea level, around 60 kilometres from Belgium's Princess Elisabeth Antarctica Research Station. Some old meteorites had been previously found there — a hint that the surrounding ice is also old, the researchers explained. A container camp was set up and after a few weeks of measurements, drilling and frozen meals, in January the team came back with 15 ice cores totalling about 60 metres in length. These were then shipped from South Africa to Belgium, where they arrived in late June. Inside a stocky cement ULB building in the Belgian capital, they are now being cut into smaller pieces to then be shipped to specialised labs in France and China for dating. Zekollari said the team hopes some of the samples, which were taken at shallow depths of about 10 meters, will be confirmed to be about 100,000 years old. A Belgian scientist handles blue ice samples in a laboratory in Brussels. - AFP CLIMATE 'TREASURE HUNT' This would allow them to go back and dig a few hundred metres deeper in the same spot for the big prize. "It's like a treasure hunt", Zekollari, 36, said, comparing their work to drawing a map for "Indiana Jones". "We're trying to cross the good spot on the map... and in one and a half years, we'll go back and we'll drill there", he said. "We're dreaming a bit, but we hope to get maybe three, four, five-million-year-old ice". Such ice could provide crucial input to climatologists studying the effects of global warming. Climate projections and models are calibrated using existing data on past temperatures and greenhouse gases in the atmosphere — but the puzzle has some missing pieces. — AFP
