Scientists Recover 1.2 Million-Year-Old Ice Core From Two Miles Deep in Antarctica

Incredible.

Natty Ice

An international team of scientists have drilled nearly two miles down into the Antarctic bedrock, extracting an ice core sample that's estimated to be at least 1.2 million years old, they announced this week.

By analyzing the sample, the researchers, working as part of the Beyond EPICA project, expect to glean critical insights about the Earth's climate and atmosphere and why it shifted away from having more frequent ice ages.

"Thanks to the ice core we will understand what has changed in terms of greenhouse gases, chemicals and dusts in the atmosphere," Carlo Barbante, an Italian glaciologist and coordinator of the European Union-funded effort, told The Associated Press.

Core Cleanser

The ice sample is a staggering 2,800 meters, or about 1.7 miles, in length. It's in the uppermost 2,480 meters where over a million years of climate history are contained, and in which "up to 13,000 years are compressed into one meter of ice," explained the project's chief field scientist Julien Westhoff in a statement.

This isn't the oldest sample ever found, but Barbante said that crucially, it does provide the longest continuous record of the Earth's past climate. A record-breaking 2.7 million year old sample extracted seven years ago was obtained from ice that was gradually driven to the surface by natural processes, and as such provided an incomplete picture (though a staggering find in its own right).

By extracting the ice, the scientists have surmounted the formidable 800,000 year barrier in the field. Obtaining continuous samples older than this has, until now, proved impossible, because ice that deep is typically melted by bedrock.

Cold Case

Previous samples extracted by Epica have already shown that the concentrations of greenhouse gases during the past 800,000 years has never exceeded the levels seen since the Industrial Revolution, according to Barbante.

"Today we are seeing carbon dioxide levels that are 50 percent above the highest levels we've had over the last 800,000 years," he told the AP.

The hope is that the new sample will provide a window into a period 900,000 to 1.2 million years ago called the Mid-Pleistocene Transition, when the Earth shifted to lengthier climate cycles. For reasons that continue to stump scientists, the planet's ice ages stopped occurring every 40,000 years, lengthening to every 100,000.

The groundbreaking ice core, along with others, will be shipped back to Europe for further analysis.

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