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Antarctica
To unravel the mystery of Earth’s past, Antarctic scientists dug 650 meters below the surface of the ice sheet in West Antarctica, and the frozen desert is the southernmost continent in the world, home to up to 5,000 specialized researchers who they study the history of the planet and the effects of climate change at temperatures as low as -90 degrees. percentage.
Because ice forms from the accumulation of annual layers of snow, the lower layers are older than the upper layers, and the remains captured by the machine allow scientists to search for millions of years.
The different isotope ratios of oxygen and hydrogen provide information on old temperatures, and the trapped air can be analyzed into tiny bubbles to determine the level of gases in the atmosphere, such as carbon dioxide.
During “Adventures in Antarctica”, Cambridge University professor Eric Wolf explained to the Royal Society why he had been inspired to complete that reading.
“There are a number of things that make it compelling that something very strange is happening about the weather,” he said. The first is that we know, in part from the type of research I’ve done, that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are higher than at least three million years ago. And we know from physics that it has to cause warming as we watch it warming up. If we take these things together, it is quite clear that we are doing something dangerous with the atmosphere. “
The researchers’ plan was revealed to “uncover the secret of Earth’s climate in the past” and Professor Wolf explained why it was so important to take a basic sample. “The objective is to excavate an ice core near what is considered the weak part of the ice sheet, in West Antarctica. By looking at it, we should be able to tell if it disappeared or sometimes decreased in the past, when it was warmer than now. Hopefully we think the ice is about 150,000 years old at the bottom. “
Then a documentary video showed the team trying to cut the long core into various sections.
Dr Robert Mulvaney, scientific program coordinator for the British Antarctic Survey, explained how a given sample can help predict the future of the Earth.
“There are many things that can be measured in ice, almost everything goes into the atmosphere,” he said in July. Pollution, gases or natural objects in the atmosphere, somehow if they are transported to the polar regions, these records are available forever. And the sea level may have been a little higher, maybe twenty feet, so we’ll get to the point where the current climate temperature appears to be the same as it was between the last Ice Age. And it becomes analogous to what we might expect in about 100 years, ”according to Express.
