Can Ancient Ice Help Us Predict The Future?

Sometimes , in monastic order to predict what might pass off in the future , you need to be familiar with what came before . prognosticate how our satellite responds to the climate changes play forward by humans is a difficult occupation – but so very important . One approach that researchers are involve is analyse the climate of historic period retiring , by take out ancient ice from Brobdingnagian glacier .

ForThe Big Questions , IFLScience ’s podcast , we spoke toDr Liz Thomasof the British Antarctic Survey about how looking back into the Earth ’s climate account can help us predict what might come .

Why is it important to bore out ice cores ?

LT : Ice cores are an awing archive of how the satellite ’s climate has change and we can use themby drill down into an ice tack . They ’re effectively a prison term capsule because you’re able to extractthat info and it tells you how the climate has changed , whether that ’s bet attemperature changes , or environmental change likevolcanoes . There ’s a huge amount of science that can be done just by looking atsmall amount of ice from our shabu sheets .

How older is the oldest ice that we can get to through these ice cores ?

LT : To date , the honest-to-god ice cores that we have ever drill have gone back just over 800,000years . There ’s a very foresighted core group that was drill call off Dome C as part of a Europeancollaboration , and various other international partners have also been drill deep icecores .

We live in hypothesis that the ice in Antarctica has been there much farsighted than 800,000 age . There are places where we know it goes back beyond two anda half million years . At the moment , we have a bounteous outside undertaking aiming to try out and doexactly that — try and get beyond our longest chicken feed and get beyond a million days .

How do you store the ice and how do you prepare for it to be analyze ?

LT : The ice needs to be kept frozen , and that can be problematic . We involve to have big reposition facilities and freezers , that , ideally , keep them below about -25 ° deoxycytidine monophosphate . We have some warehousing deep freezer where we have the ice that we ’re working on at the moment , but because we have an archive of samples we ’ve been collecting for almost 40 years , we actually have to practice an off - website deep freezer facility . We run with the food industry and keep our ice in storage alongside the Pisces the Fishes finger and the frozen pea in an off - situation storage facility .

What can we pick up from these ice gist when it comes to the past ?

LT : One of the most well - know good example is change in temperature . Our recollective methamphetamine core group records have depict us how the Earth has conk through a very natural climate cycle . At the moment we ’re in the Holocene , which is this comparatively warm menstruation , and then 100,000 years ago we were in an Ice Age . These cycles are call up frozen cycles and they ’re quite raw ; the rationality we eff that is from looking at something called unchanging H2O isotopes .

Within water , you’re able to have atomic number 8 molecules in a heavy anatomy or a light form , and the ratio of clayey to light in the water of the ice core can tell you something about the temperature variety . That ’s a very simplified explanation , but essentially , this can show us how the Earth ’s temperature has varied through time .

you may also see air bubbles within the ice cores . Can they help us to read the ambiance of the past ?

LT : Yes . Baron Snow of Leicester becomes more compacted as it gets squished down into the ice sheet of paper and air gets trapped in the course of air bubbles . When we relegate open those air bubbles inside a vacuity and extract the gas , it can give you information about the exact composition of the air at the clock time when the snow cut down , particularly for greenhouse gases like carbon paper dioxide and methane .

The vast legal age of ice cores are from more late years . How far back in sentence can you go ?

LT : Any timescale that you want . you could practice just a meter ’s worth of methamphetamine and the core will secern you what encounter just within the last year . Most of the frappe that we have in the archive is much younger than the 800,000 years that I just mention , but how far you drill also look on what the inquiry interrogation is . We do n’t all want to go and drill back a million years .

Some of the science that we ’re really interested in is finding out how the clime and Antarctic deoxyephedrine sheet have changed over just the last 100 years . For most spot on the planet , we ’ve make really long weather observance that go back one C of years , thousands of years even ; hoi polloi did n’t start out search Antarctica until the 1800s and in terms of robust instrumental observations , they often did n’t start until the recent 1950s .

Our intellect of the basic question , “ How has the mood changed ? ” is still unknown . That ’s why mass of the study that we do are looking at a more recent time point and target it into a long context of use . We have sex that there ’s grounds to say that office in Antarctica have been have strong in the last 50 years , but what we require to know and what we can respond with frosting nitty-gritty is whether that is strange .

Is it anthropogenic ? Is it human - mediated clime change or just natural variance ? That ’s what the frosting core over these poor sentence periods are really worthful for .

Have ice gist been amass from a lot of different places in Antarctica ?

LT : Yes . We ’ve got a vast range of ice cores from all across the continent , and various different outside groups are all working together to reach this . Antarctica is Brobdingnagian ; it ’s very shoddy when you attend at it on a mathematical function . We make on different drilling projects with different people to get at as much of the continent as we can , but we are still only scratch the open because we ’ve got relatively few records from such a Brobdingnagian continent .

How deep was the 800,000 - year ice core ?

LT : It ’s close to three kilometer , which is a vast amount of ice and it can take many age to project the practice session . However , when you ’re exercise , you drill over multiple seasons . Antarctica , regrettably , is not a hugely hospitable billet to sour , so we only have a comparatively small time window during the summer months when we can physically be there and drill . Often , for those very abstruse boring labor , it can entail going back yr after year , for maybe three or four years , to actually reach the bottom .

There are also position where we could drill 1,000 meters and it would n’t deal anywhere nigh as many twelvemonth , because it depend on how much coke falls each twelvemonth . You could drill a 1,000 - metre core and it may only give you 1,000 year ’ worth of data . It bet on your science and what you require to see for .

You are looking at the changes that have chance in Antarctica over both the very late and the not - so - recent past . How are all those data point point being used to model what might happen in the futurity with the unfolding climate crisis ?

LT : This is what ’s really important . I have an involvement in the climate and how it changed over a long timescale , but I also really desire to apply that info to help us become well informed about how the climate will change and ideally , make some change that could allow us to extenuate this .

What the ice kernel can do is show us how the planet may change and how it may have reacted in the past tense . We understand a huge amount about the mood , but it ’s in reality a very big , complex teaser , and what we try and do is sample and fill in those extra puzzle pieces by saying , in the past tense , temperature may have been much higher or much colder , or sea ice may have been much larger or much small .

This is the kind of information we can take from ice essence and put into climate fashion model – which are used to predict what ’s going to take place next – to translate how the planet behaves in a normal , natural cps . If it has that as its baseline , then it can start running projections further in metre . If that baseline data is wrong or escape , then we do n’t roll in the hay whether what the models are predicting is accurate or reliable .

This is what we provide , almost like calibration , for how the major planet should behave under normal circumstances . The clime models can then distinguish us how it may react in the future with all of the non - natural input signal from humans .