Oldest Ice Core in Antarctica Being Studied

Climatologists have started to drill into the oldest ice core in Antarctica to find some air that may have been there around 1 million to 900,000 years ago.  The teams are from Australia, China, and Europe in a friendly type competition to find samples of air that is about 1.5 million years old. They would like to find out what the air was like back then compared to the air now.  When they do this, they will be able to measure the CO2’s influence on today’s air.

The time period of about 2 million years ago when the ice-age cycle of freezing glacial transitioned with the warm inter-glacial cycle was a significant event in the history of the earth’s climate.  They would like to know why that time period flipped from 40,000 years to 100,000 years in length.  They are studying the oldest ice core samples in order to find out if the earth is going into another ice-age cycle they need to study the air of the past.

Continuous use of greenhouse gases in unnatural quantities, that has been going on for a century or longer, is why they are studying the oldest ice cores from deep under the ice in Antarctica.  This study will show how it is really going to affect the air quality in the future.