An international team has successfully extracted the world’s oldest ice sample from Antarctica. Spanning 1.2 million years of climate history, this ancient ice core promises to unveil secrets about Earth’s past climate systems and help us understand the climate of Earth’s future.
This achievement is part of the “Beyond EPICA” project, a collaboration involving twelve scientific institutions, including Switzerland’s University of Bern. Launched in 2009 and coordinated by the Polar Science Institute of the Italian National Research Council, the project aims to solve enduring mysteries about climate transitions and refine predictions for future climate scenarios.
Extracted from a depth of 2,800 meters at Little Dome C on the Antarctic Plateau, the ice core contains air bubbles trapped over a million years ago. These bubbles hold crucial information about atmospheric conditions, including greenhouse gas levels such as CO2 and methane. Researchers hope that by looking at the past, we can uncover more details about Earth’s future climate.
They plan to study the ice to understand the link between greenhouse gases and global temperatures during a pivotal period known as the Mid-Pleistocene Transition (900,000–1.2 million years ago). This era marked a dramatic change in the Earth’s climate cycles.
During this time, the interval between cold glacial periods and warm interglacial periods shifted from 40,000 years to 100,000 years. Scientists have long puzzled over the reasons for this shift, which remains one of the most complex mysteries of climate science. If we can deduce why it happened, we might be able to better understand the future of Earth’s climate changes.
Considering our newest models cannot explain Earth’s current climate, researchers hope to unveil a smoking gun by looking into the past. Starting this March, the extracted ice samples will be analyzed in Europe using advanced techniques developed by the University of Bern.
Their innovative laser beam method allows precise measurement of greenhouse gases without contaminating the samples. This technique requires only a 1 cm thick ice sample, enabling unprecedented accuracy in tracing historical CO2 levels.
By uncovering how greenhouse gases influenced the Earth’s climate millions of years ago, scientists aim to refine climate models and improve projections for future scenarios. Understanding these ancient mechanisms is crucial for anticipating the climate of Earth’s future and guiding global efforts to mitigate climate change.
The post Scientists are looking to the past to predict the climate of Earth’s future appeared first on BGR.
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Scientists are looking to the past to predict the climate of Earth’s future originally appeared on BGR.com on Mon, 13 Jan 2025 at 19:45:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.