Unique Ice, 1.5 m year, to melt to unlock the mystery

A nucleus of ice that could be over 1.5 million years old has arrived in the United Kingdom where scientists found them to unlock vital information on the climate of the earth.

The glassy cylinder is the oldest ice on the planet and was drilled inside the antarctic ice cap.

Frozen Inside is thousands of years of new information which, according to scientists, could “revolutionize” what we know about climate change.

BBC News entered the –23C freezing room of the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge to see the precious ice boxes.

“This is a completely unknown period in the history of our land,” said Dr. Liz Thomas, manager of the Ice Nuclei at British Antarctic Survey.

Red warning lights flash above the door, and inside there is an emergency escape hatch in a tunnel in case something goes wrong.

The rules say that we could only enter inside for 15 minutes at a time, wearing a padded overalls, boots, hats and gloves.

The electronic pane of our camera closed and our hair started to crack because it became frozen.

On a work plan alongside stacked ice boxes, Dr. Thomas highlights the oldest nuclei that could have 1.5 million years. They shine and are so clear that we can see our hands through them.

For seven weeks, the team slowly melts the hard -won ice, releasing ancient dust, volcanic ash and even tiny seaweed called diatoms that were locked inside when the water turned into ice.

These materials can inform scientists of wind patterns, temperature and sea level over a million years ago.

The tubes will feed the liquid with machines in a laboratory next door which is one of the only places in the world to be able to make this science.

It was a huge multinational effort to extract ice nuclei in Antarctica, at a cost of millions. The ice was cut into blocks of 1 m and transported by boat then in a cold van in Cambridge.

Engineer James Veal has helped extract the ice near the Concordia base in eastern Antarctica.

“To hold that in my carefully gloved hands and be very careful not to drop the sections – it was an incredible feeling,” he said.

Two institutions in Germany and Switzerland also received transversal covers of the 2.8 km nucleus.

Teams could find evidence of a period of time over 800,000 years ago when the concentrations of carbon dioxide may have been naturally as high or even higher as they are currently, according to Dr. Thomas.

This could help them understand what will happen in our future, because our planet responds to the warming of gases trapped in our atmosphere.

“Our climate system has crossed so many different changes that we must really be able to go back in time to understand these different processes and different shift points,” she said.

The difference between today’s times and previous eras with high greenhouse gases is that humans have caused the rapid increase in warming gases in the past 150 years.

This takes us to an undeniable territory, but scientists hope that the environmental history of our planet enclosed in the ice could give us advice.

The team will identify chemical isotopes in the liquid that could tell us the wind models, temperatures and precipitation for a period between 800,000 and up to 1.5 million years or perhaps more.

They will use an instrument called a plasma mass spectrometer with inductive torque (ICPMS) to measure more than 20 elements and traces of metals.

This includes rare earth elements, sea salts and marine elements, as well as indicators of past volcanic eruptions.

Work will help scientists understand a mysterious change called the transition from the Pleistocene environment from 800,000 to 1.2 million years when the planet’s glacial cycles have suddenly changed.

The transition of warmer eras with cold glacial eras, when the ice has covered much more soil, had been every 41,000 years, but suddenly increased to 100,000 years.

The cause of this change is one of the “most exciting questions unstolled” in climate science, according to Dr. Thomas.

The nuclei can have signs of time when the sea level was much higher than they are currently and where the vast antarctic glacial caps were smaller.

The presence of dust in ice will help them understand how the glacial caps have shrunk and contributed to the elevation of sea level – something that is a major concern this century.