It’s the culmination of an ambitious four-year project: this Thursday, January 9, a team of researchers from the Beyond Epica project announced that they had finally reached the rocky base beneath the Antarctic polar cap. A 2.8 km borehole that revealed 1.2 million year old ice!
For researchers, the ice cap that covers Antarctica is a huge climate reservoir. The GazGaz and other dust particles trapped in the ice make it possible to study the composition of the atmosphere at the time the crystals formed. The deeper we dig into the ice sheet, the more it is possible to go back in time.
A team of European scientists has unearthed one of the oldest ice cores ever recovered. By drilling 2.8 km deep into the bedrock, researchers have actually recovered 1.2 million-year-old ice!
It took four years to carry out this drilling under difficult conditions: the average temperature of the Concordia station is actually around -35°C.
Understand Earth’s climatic history and the impact of humans on the current climate.
Analysis of ice cores should make it possible to obtain valuable information about the glacial cycles, which marked the last million years, and to better understand their effects. CarbonCarbon But the environment Climate changeClimate change.
Previous ice core studies that have made it possible to go back in time 800,000 years have already shown that even during the warmest periods of that time interval, levels of greenhouse gases – such as CO2 And methane—has never been higher since the start of the Industrial Revolution. ” Today, we observe CO levels.2 That’s 50% higher than the highest level recorded in the last 800,000 years. », Carlo Barbante, the Italian glaciologist and project coordinator who carried out the drilling, explained in a press release.
There is no doubt that the analyzes carried out on the new cover will confirm this sad fact.
