Science Race Targets First Million-Year-Old Ice Sample

Understanding the climate changes we are seeing today is impossible without knowing more about Earth's past, and that, in turn, is impossible without analyzing ice core sample. At this time, researchers from a number of countries are racing to extract the first ice core spanning back 1 million years.

The reason why analyzing the ice is so important is because it contains a wealth of information about the time when it was formed. When snow falls to the ground, its chemical composition is influenced by the characteristics of the atmosphere at that particular time.

Ice is formed as snow falls in neat layers, which are then compressed by additional snow falling above. Eventually, these layers harden to form multi-year ice. Despite being compressed, they still contain useful data about the climate.

When experts are using drills to extract such cores, they are essentially looking back into Earth's climate past. They can see variations in precipitation levels, temperatures, CO2 and oxygen concentrations and other such traits.

Naturally, the farther back they look into the past, the more data experts gather. Analyzing a 1-million-year-old core is a holy grail in climate research, and this is why a true international race is currently unfolding in Antarctica to enable this study.

Ten nations currently form one of the teams involved in the research effort. The collaboration is called the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica (EPICA), and it's operating at DOME C, in Antarctica, Daily Galaxy reports.

Thus far, the team managed to extract a 3,000-meter ice core, which was demonstrated to span more than 800,000 years. However, they need to go deeper if they want to reach the 1-million-year mark.

But the collaboration recently got some new competition, from the Australian Antarctic Division, a US scientific contingent; and the Chinese Arctic and Antarctic Administration. All these scientists are now working towards the same objective.

Regardless of who gets to this objective first, the fact of the matter remains that obtaining the elusive core will help scientists develop better climate models, that will enable us to figure out how the planet's climate will change in response to global warming.