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September 28, 2019 03:30 am

Scientists Prepare To Drill For Million-Year-Old Ice In Antarctica

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Million-year-old ice buried deep in Antarctica could hold crucial information about the planet's past and help climate predictions. And scientists with the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD) are a step closer to unearthing it. On Monday, they unveiled a drill designed to reach three kilometers below the surface of the frozen continent. The ice, believed to be up to 1.5m years old, is the target of several international research projects. "What we're embarking on over the next few years is to solve one of the last great problems in climate science," glaciologist Tas van Ommen said. "We'll see in the ice, tiny bubbles that are trapped between snowflakes in the ice as it gets buried," van Ommen said. "These tiny bubbles are time capsules of past atmosphere. "We want to get that ice, analyze those time capsules and understand what [carbon dioxide] did in that period around one million years ago when the climate was changing." About 1 million years ago the Earth shifted from a 40,000-year ice age cycle to a 100,000-year cycle, van Ommen said. "[Carbon dioxide] is tied up in that change and it changes the rate at which ice ages have worked in the past," he added. "We need to understand if the CO2 we put in the atmosphere will have long-term consequences for the Earth in the future." According to the report, the drilling is expected to begin in 2021 and take four years to complete.

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