Scientists Drill For “Oldest Ice On Earth” To Unlock Mystery Of Ancient Earth’s Changing Climate

Credit: British Antarctic Survey

The EPICA ice cores clearly showed CO2 lagging behind temperature increases – probably by centuries. But observed effects aren’t supposed to precede alleged causes.

European scientists from 10 countries have spent years scouring the Antarctic ice sheet with one ambition in mind: to drill for the oldest-ever ice core.

Now, they have zeroed in on just the spot says IFL Science.

The team have chosen Little Dome C – one of the coldest, most barren places on Earth. For the next five years, they will drill for a 1.5-million-year-old ice core – a frozen timepiece of Earth’s climatic past.

The news was announced at the annual conference of the European Geosciences Union (EGU) in Vienna.

Their mission, called “Beyond EPICA-Oldest Ice”, will take place 30 kilometers (18.5 miles) away from the Concordia Research Station in what is a two-hour snowmobile ride to work.

The team finalized their location using radar and test drillings at depths of up to 400 meters (1,300 feet). Three criteria had to be met before they could gear up for a chilly five years: the ice is at least 1.5 million years old, there is a high chance of good resolution for scientific research, and the layers are undisturbed.

The current record for oldest ice core is 800,000 years old, taken by the European Project for Ice Coring (EPICA) project, an analysis of which revealed CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere over hundreds of thousands of years.

These cores are records of ice that have built up over millennia – long icicle scrolls of sorts that have preserved knowledge of Earth’s ancient atmosphere.

The EPICA ice core provided scientists with plenty of information, but it also presented them with a mystery. They found that starting around 900,000 years ago, the climate changed from 40,000-year cycles to 100,000-year cycles. Researchers in the field don’t know why.

“This time interval is characterized by ice ages that were interrupted by relatively short warm periods, like the one that we are currently experiencing, every 100,000 years or so,” said Swiss team lead Hubertus Fischer, from the Oeschger Center at the University of Bern, in a statement. “The CO2 concentrations also changed at the same time: low values in ice ages, high values in warm periods.”

The team suspect the reason has to do with greenhouse gases, but until they gather more evidence, they can’t say for certain. That’s where the Beyond EPICA-Oldest Ice mission enters the investigation.

“After having analyzed the 800,000-year-old samples taken from the EPICA ice cores, we believe that there is good reason to drill into ice that is at least 1.5 million years old in order to get more information,” said mission coordinator Olaf Eisen from the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) in Bremerhaven.

Full report here.