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| Science & Technology |
| Unique 1.5m year-old ice to be melted to unlock mystery |
| 2025-07-20 |
| [BBC] 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. "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. 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. 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 ship and then in a cold van to Cambridge. 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. 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 shrank and contributed to sea level rise - something that is a major concern this century. |
| Posted by:Skidmark |
| #3 This movie never ends well. Mike |
| Posted by: MikeKozlowski 2025-07-20 15:52 |
| #2 Frozen inside is Or population reduction. |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2025-07-20 14:19 |
| #1 With Tito's and tonic? |
| Posted by: Frank G 2025-07-20 13:46 |