Million Year-Old Bubbles Could Solve Ice Age Puzzle

What is probably the world's oldest ice, dating back 1.2 million years, has been extracted from deep within Antarctica.

Credit: PNRA_IPEV

In a remarkable feat of engineering, a team of European scientists extracted a 1.74 mile long (2.8km) cylinder, or core, of ice. That's longer than eight Eiffel Towers stacked on top of one another.

Suspended inside the ice are ancient air bubbles which scientists hope will help solve an enduring mystery about our planet's climate history. Namely, what happened 900,000 to 1.2 million years ago when glacial cycles were disrupted and some researchers say our ancestors came close to extinction.

"It's an amazing achievement," says Prof Carlo Barbante at Ca' Foscari University of Venice who co-ordinated the research.

Ice cores are a vital to scientists' understanding of how our climate is changing. They trap bubbles of air and particles that reveal levels of greenhouse gas emissions and temperature variation that help scientists plot how climatic conditions have altered over time. Data from other ice cores, including one called Epica, helped scientists conclude that the current rise in temperature linked to greenhouse gas emissions is caused by humans burning fossil fuels.

But scientists wanted to go further back in time. Now with this project Beyond Epica: Oldest Ice they have gained potentially another 400,000 years of history.

Experts want to understand what happened in a period 900,000 to 1.2 million years ago called the Mid-Pleistocene Transition. At this time, the length of the cycle between cold glacial and warm interglacials switched from being 41,000 years to 100,000 years. But scientists have never understood why. Maybe they will soon.

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