{"id":1122,"date":"2020-01-20T18:38:16","date_gmt":"2020-01-20T18:38:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/horizon.peachpuff-wolverine-566518.hostingersite.com\/?p=1122"},"modified":"2020-01-20T18:38:36","modified_gmt":"2020-01-20T18:38:36","slug":"deep-antarctic-drilling-will-reveal-climate-secrets-trapped-in-1-5-million-year-old-ice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/horizon\/1122\/deep-antarctic-drilling-will-reveal-climate-secrets-trapped-in-1-5-million-year-old-ice\/","title":{"rendered":"Deep Antarctic drilling will reveal climate secrets trapped in 1.5 million-year-old ice"},"content":{"rendered":"
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by Richard Gray\u00a0<\/em><\/h5>\n

An ambitious mission to drill into the Antarctic ice sheet to extract some of the oldest ice on the planet will provide vital clues about a mysterious shift in the behaviour of our planet\u2019s climate.<\/strong><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Drilling into the ice of Antarctica is like going back in time. Frozen within it are relics from long past eras \u2013 dust that settled on the surface long ago and bubbles of air trapped by ancient blizzards.<\/p>\n

For scientists hoping to understand how the Earth\u2019s climate has changed in the past, it is a treasure trove. Packed into every metre of ice are thousands of years-worth of these precious artefacts.<\/p>\n

Now an international team of researchers are hoping to drill more than 2,700 metres below the surface in their search for ice that is up to 1.5 million years old.<\/p>\n

Their aim is to extract ice cores that will help them to piece together what happened to our planet\u2019s climate during a crucial and mysterious period of change that occurred around 1 million years ago.<\/p>\n

\u2018Over the last few million years, the Earth\u2019s climate has oscillated between cold glacial periods of time and shorter, warmer interglacial periods,\u2019 said Professor Carlo Barbante, an analytical chemist at Ca’Foscari University of Venice, Italy, and coordinator of the\u00a0Beyond EPICA project<\/a>\u00a0that is hoping to recover the ice cores.<\/p>\n

\u2018We know from information contained within marine sediments that we would have one warm and one cold period every 41,000 years, but then around 1 million years ago, this cycle changed to have a periodicity of about every 100,000 years.<\/p>\n

\u2018We don\u2019t know exactly why this change occurred. Most probably it was due to changes in the carbon dioxide cycle.\u2019<\/p>\n

Orbit<\/strong><\/p>\n

Much of the glacial cycle on Earth is driven by our\u00a0planet\u2019s less than perfect orbit around the sun<\/a>\u00a0and the fact that it tends to wobble on its axis. But other changes, such as volcanic activity that throws aerosols into the air and the\u00a0levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere<\/a>, also influence this cycle.<\/p>\n

By analysing ice dating back to around the time of the change in the glacial cycle, Prof. Barbante and his colleagues hope to find preserved dust, gas and isotopes that can tell them what may have led to this shift in the climate.<\/p>\n

\u2018Understanding this period from the past is important because it can help us to answer questions we have about the sensitivity of our climate today,\u2019 said Prof. Barbante.<\/p>\n

While scientists know that increases in greenhouse gases cause the climate of the planet to warm, it is difficult to model the exact impacts of this due to the complexity of the climate system.<\/p>\n

Correlating climate changes in the past to carbon dioxide concentrations can help make better predictions about what our own greenhouse gas emissions will do to the planet.<\/p>\n

\u2018We hope to fill in gaps in our knowledge about how the Earth will respond to changes in greenhouse gas concentrations,\u2019 added Prof. Barbante.<\/p>\n

Prof. Barbante and his colleagues are hoping to build on the success of a previous project called the\u00a0European Project for Ice Coring in\u00a0Antarctica\u00a0(EPICA<\/a>), which drilled to a depth of 3,270 metres at a site called Dome C, close to the French-Italian research facility\u00a0Concordia Station<\/a>\u00a0on the Polar Plateau of East Antarctica. By 2006, after 10 years of drilling, the team had obtained\u00a0ice that was up to 820,000 years old<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Beyond EPICA team have spent the past three years conducting new surveys with the help of radar mounted on aircraft and sledges to identify a site with older ice.<\/p>\n

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\u2018This precious ice gives us a chance to look back to a time when the world was different.\u2019<\/p>\n

Prof. Carlo Barbante, Ca’Foscari University of Venice, Italy<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

The key has been to find parts of the ice sheet that are deep enough to contain ice that is over a million years old, but not so deep that the pressure from the ice above causes the bottom to melt.<\/p>\n

\u2018We had two candidate sites \u2013 about 40km from the Concordia base in an area known as Little Dome C and another close to a Japanese base called Dome Fuji Station,\u2019 says Professor Olaf Eisen, a glaciologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, Germany, who led the search for the new drilling site.<\/p>\n

\u2018We wanted nice layered ice, with continuous accumulation of snow at the surface and bed rock that is not too mountainous so it doesn\u2019t disturb the stratigraphy (layers) of the ice.\u2019<\/p>\n

Topography<\/strong><\/p>\n

The radar images allowed the team to\u00a0see distinct boundaries in the ice<\/a>\u00a0that they could use to estimate its age and also see the shape of the rock beneath. They eventually settled on the site at Little Dome C. The underlying topography of the land and variations in the amount of ice that has accumulated above it over time mean they will not need to drill as deep as they did with the original EPICA project to reach the oldest ice. They estimate they will find ice more than 1 million years old at a depth of about 2,700 metres.<\/p>\n

\u2018The ice on the plateau there is nicely stratified and undisturbed,\u2019 added Prof. Eisen.<\/p>\n

The team are now embarking on the next phase of the project, which is to start drilling and retrieving the ice. At the end of last year, they began building their camp at the site and preparing a trench where they will drill a preparatory hole through the first 20 metres of porous snowpack, or \u2018firn\u2019, on top of the ice sheet.<\/p>\n

They aim to drill the first 150 metres into the ice over the next Antarctic summer between November 2020 and January 2021. As they drill down, the team will pump a thick, non-toxic fluid into the resulting borehole to prevent the pressure of the ice sheet from closing it up.<\/p>\n

\u2018We hope to reach the bed rock within three to four seasons, if everything goes well,\u2019 said Prof. Barbante. \u2018This precious ice gives us a chance to look back to a time when the world was different. Human beings were not around, at least not as\u00a0Homo sapiens<\/em>, and the climate was in a very different mode.<\/p>\n

\u2018It is fascinating archive of the past, but it can help us also understand the future.\u2019<\/p>\n

Originally published by Horizon\u00a0<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Richard Gray\u00a0 An ambitious mission to drill into the Antarctic ice sheet to extract some of the oldest ice on the planet will provide vital clues about a mysterious shift in the behaviour of our planet\u2019s climate. Drilling into the ice of Antarctica is like going back in time. Frozen within it are relics … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":298,"featured_media":1123,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[126,343,4,355,354],"class_list":["post-1122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-earth-energy-environment","tag-climate-change","tag-cryosphere","tag-environment","tag-ice-cores","tag-jan20"],"yoast_head":"\nDeep Antarctic drilling will reveal climate secrets trapped in 1.5 million-year-old ice - Horizon Magazine Blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/horizon\/1122\/deep-antarctic-drilling-will-reveal-climate-secrets-trapped-in-1-5-million-year-old-ice\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Deep Antarctic drilling will reveal climate secrets trapped in 1.5 million-year-old ice\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"by Richard Gray\u00a0 An ambitious mission to drill into the Antarctic ice sheet to extract some of the oldest ice on the planet will provide vital clues about a mysterious shift in the behaviour of our planet\u2019s climate. 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