Scientists Will Melt Earth’s Oldest Ice to Reveal Its Climate History

Currently, a team of UK scientists is beginning to melt some of the oldest ice on Earth to learn about our planet’s climate history from 1.5 million years ago.

in Cambridge, England. This process will release any dust particles, volcanic ash, and single-celled algae or organisms preserved inside when the water froze into ice.

The ice was extracted by an international team of scientists working at -35 degrees Celsius. They drilled a 1.7-mile-long piece of ice in Antarctica and carefully shipped it to laboratories in Europe.

These materials can enhance scientists’ understanding of wind patterns, temperatures, and sea levels from millions of years ago. They can also demonstrate Earth’s ancient climate and atmospheric composition, provide insights into the influence of greenhouse gases on global temperatures, and predict Earth’s future based on human-generated emissions.

Liz Thomas, head of the ice core research at the British Antarctic Survey said, “Our climate system has been through so many different changes that we really need to be able to go back in time to understand these different processes and different tipping points.”

One crucial aspect scientists hope to solve is the mystery of why Earth’s glacial cycles switched at a point between 800,000 and 1.2 million years ago, called the Mid-Pleistocene Transition.

In this transition, glacial cycles became more intense and asymmetric as ice ages came every 100,000 years instead of every 41,000 years. This was caused by changes in the shape of Earth’s orbit. The Mid-Pleistocene Transition (MPT) is associated with a shift towards drier conditions and more vegetation (grasslands, deserts, etc.). Antarctic ice core analysis in 2004 revealed a link between Earth’s climate and atmospheric gases in the past 800,000 years. This suggested that Earth experienced ice ages scattered with warmer periods on a 100,000-year cycle. Marine sediment records, however, dating back at least 1 million years, indicated glacial periods occurred more frequently.

Thomas and her team believe the new cores will reveal the greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere during the MPT and could explain the reason for its occurrence.

Thomas explained, “The project is driven by a central scientific question: why did the planet’s climate cycle shift roughly one million years ago from a 41,000-year to a 100,000-year phasing of glacial-interglacial cycles? By extending the ice core record beyond this turning point, researchers hope to improve predictions of how Earth’s climate may respond to future greenhouse gas increases.”

By analyzing these ancient ice cores, scientists aim to unlock critical information about Earth’s climate shifts during the Mid-Pleistocene Transition, improving our understanding of past climate behavior.

Sources:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/articles/ce8zl6lr040o#:~:text=UK%20scientists%20melt%20’world’s%20oldest%20ice’%20to%20reveal%20Earth’s%20ancient%20history,-Getty%20Images&text=A%20sample%20of%20the%20world’s,around%201.2%20million%20years%20old.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-023-00754-0#:~:text=Hypotheses%20involving%20a%20gradual%20mechanism,sediments25%2C26%2C27.

https://gizmodo.com/scientists-will-melt-some-of-earths-oldest-ice-to-solve-climate-mystery-2000631327#:~:text=These%20materials%20hold%20clues%20about,about%20once%20every%2041%2C000%20years.