14 DAY TRIAL // It took two years to drill 3 kilometers under Antarctica in order to discover a million-year-old ice sample, the oldest piece of ice in the world, which could uncover vital clues on climate change, informs Reuters.
When showing off the sample taken from Antarctica, researchers said that only the core can be used for further analysis, the results being able to predict how Earth's weather patterns will change in the future.
"The ice core is made up of snow that fell in the distant past", said project leader, Hideaki Motoyama, of the National Institute of Polar Research. "You can use it to examine changes in temperature, levels of carbon dioxide and methane over time, information that is only available from the core," he added.
The researchers at the Dome Fuji base in the eastern Antarctic were the ones who drilled for two years into the ice sheet, revealing million-year-old samples in January and shipping them to Japan on an icebreaker.
The Japanese team hopes that the "ice oracle" will also uncover the secrets of the evolution concerning tiny organisms which might be found in ice.
"The environment there is very harsh, with temperatures about minus 45 degrees, so we don't know if life can be sustained", Motoyama said. "But we believe we will find organisms."