Unique ice, 1.5m year old, to be melted to unlock mystery

An ice core that can be more than 1.5 million years old, has come to the UK, where scientists will melt it to unlock important information about the Earth’s climate.

The glassy cylinder is the oldest snow of the planet and was drilled deep inside the Antarctic ice sheet.

Frozen Inside is a new information of thousands of years that scientists say that we can “revolution” what we know about climate change.

The BBC News went inside the -23C Freezer Room in the British Antarctic survey in Cambridge to see the precious boxes of ice.

The head of Ice Core Research in the British Antarctic Survey, Dr. “This is a completely unknown period of our Earth’s history,” says Liz Thomas.

The red warning light shines above the door, and an emergency in a tunnel inside is a hatch when something went wrong.

Rules say that we can only go in for 15 minutes at a time, wearing padded overalls, shoes, hats and gloves.

The electronic shutter of our camera stopped and our hair started cracking after being icy.

On a worktop next to the snow’s stacked box, Dr. Thomas indicate the oldest core that may be 1.5 million years old. They shine and are so clear that we can see our hands through them.

For seven weeks, the team will gradually melt hard-von ice, release ancient dust, volcanic ash, and even small seaweed, called the diamm that was closed inside when water was turned into water.

These materials can tell scientists about wind pattern, temperature and sea level more than one million years in advance.

The tube will feed a liquid in machines to a lab next door that is one of the only places in the world that can do this science.

This was a major multinational effort to remove the ice core at Antarctica at a cost of millions. The ice was cut into 1 meter block and moved by boat to Cambridge in a cold van.

Engineer James Weel helped remove ice close to the Concorda base in East Antarctica.

“To wear that my carefully in my hands and be very careful not to leave the squares – it was a wonderful feeling,” they say.

Two institutions in Germany and Switzerland have also received cross-sections of 2.8 km core.

Dr. According to Thomas, teams could find evidence of the duration of time more than 800,000 years ago, when carbon dioxide concentrations could naturally be more or more.

This can help them understand what will happen in our future because our planet responds to heating the gases stuck in our environment.

“Our climate system has been through such different changes that we really need to be able to return to time to understand these various processes and different tipping points,” she says.

The difference between high greenhouse gases today and between the previous ages is that now humans have caused a rapid increase in hot gases in the last 150 years.

This is taking us to the unchanged area, but scientists hope that the record of our planet’s environmental history locked in snow may give us some guidance.

The team will identify chemical isotopes in the liquid that can tell us the air pattern, temperature and rainfall for the period between 800,000 and 1.5 million years ago or possibly over.

They will use an individual duo plasma mass spectrometer (ICPMS) to measure more than 20 elements and detect metals.

This includes rare earth elements, marine salts and marine elements, as well as indicators of previous volcanic eruptions.

This task will help scientists understand a mysterious change, which the mid-plastosine infection is called 800,000 to 1.2 million years ago, when the planet’s glacial cycles suddenly changed.

Infections in the glacial era of cold from warm ages, when ice covered too much of the Earth, was done every 41,000 years, but it suddenly turned to 100,000 years.

Dr. According to Thomas, the cause of this innings is one of the “most exciting unresolved questions” in climate science.

There may be a time proof in the core when the sea level was much higher than now and when the huge Antarctic snow sheets were smaller.

The presence of dust in the snow will help them understand how the snow sheets shrunk and contributed to the increase in sea level – something that is a great concern in this century.