Inside plan to drill one million years into the past

RESEARCHERS have revealed plans to drill into Antarctican ice sheets in the hopes of recovering one of the oldest continuous ice cores.

Located in the easter region of Antarctica is a 4,500-foot snow hill called Law Dome – under its surface is an ice core considered to be one of the ‘Holy Grails’ of Antarctica.

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Ice cores help scientists look back into the past in the hopes of understanding Earth’s climate history and ice ages, per CNET.

They can also provide insight into the Antarctic, which may help scientists tackle climate change.

“It’s probably the most pure recorder of environmental information of any paleoclimate archive,” Tas van Ommen, an ice core scientist at the Australian Antarctic Division, said.

And this particular ice core is one million years old.

Still, retrieving it is no easy feat and requires a team of scientists and a lot of expensive drilling instruments and gear.

However, one Australian scientist named Joel Pedro is rising up to the challenge via a project designated Million Year Ice Core.

The mission was due to start over the 2021/22 summer season, however, due to COVID and poor weather conditions, it was pushed back.

Initially, the team had set out to retrieve a separate ice core in another region called Little Dome C but were beat out by a team of European scientists.

This prompted Pedro’s team to move their mission along in the Law Dome area.

Now the race is on for the valuable ice core which may help scientists figure out what happened during a pivotal period in Earth’s history.

“Sometime between 1.2 million and 800,000 years ago, the planet underwent a revolution,” CNET wrote in their report.

“Before this time, Earth experienced an ice age, a period of cooler temperatures and accelerated ice sheet formation, once every 41,000 years.”

“But for the last million years, the ice age cycles have been operating on 100,000-year cycles. Something changed. Scientists aren’t sure what.”

This particular ice core could tell researchers part of what occurred during this period via carbon dioxide concentrations trapped in the ice.

“It’s giving you a piece of the jigsaw,” van Ommen said.

“But if you really want to understand processes, cause and effect and the way things evolve, it’s much harder if you just get little jigsaw pieces,” he added.

And while it’s unclear exactly what data science will yield from the piece of ice, it will likely prove to be quite informative.