Tiny air bubbles 3,000 metres below the surface of Antarctica will unlock its climate history – and help predict the temperatures of the future.
To put the depth in some context, Australia’s tallest mountain, Mount Kosciuszko, is 2,228 metres tall.
The Australian Antarctic Division has just started its drilling project and the region’s extreme weather means the researchers won’t reach their destination at the bottom of the bedrock until 2028 or 2029.
Dr Joel Pedro is the lead scientist for the Million Year Ice Core project.
“One of the challenges is that it’s so cold and high here that you can really only work for sort of about seven weeks a year in December to January, and then it gets too cold, it’s about minus 50 degrees down there in the in the ice trench” Dr Pedro said.
Photo supplied by The Australian Antarctic Division
Dr Pedro says the tiny bubbles buried deep down in Antarctica will provide a snapshot of the past.
“That snow is compressed enough that it forms ice, and the air that was in the snow gets trapped into air bubbles, and those air bubbles are a perfect sample of the Earth’s atmosphere at the time,” Dr Pedro said.
“If we imagine that the snow falling over a million years ago that air is locked into the bubbles here at something like 2900 to 3000 metres depth.
“We will use special techniques to release that air and measure the concentration of things like carbon dioxide and methane, and also variants of isotopes of carbon dioxide that tell us about the origins of changes in those gas compositions”.
“The data we generate from this project will stand for generations, really, to recover the oldest continuous ice core record. That data will be used by generations of scientists.”
The current oldest ice core record is from a nearby dome in Antarctica called Concordia.
“That record was really valuable but the importance of now pushing that record back even further in time is because Earth’s climate is changing. It’s becoming a bit warmer,” he said.
“The volume of ice on the planet is lower, and the Ice Age cycles then were faster than they have been in the last 800,000 years.
There’s a lot for us to learn about the physics of the climate in that time that we think is valuable for helping us predict how the climate is going to respond in the future to increased greenhouse gasses. So that’s the that’s the really driving motivation.
The super valuable records that we bring up from from that ice that we expect to be new to science.”
Feature image: Dr Joel Pedro in Antarctica. Photo supplied by The Australian Antarctic Division
