Scientists Search for ‘Holy Grail’ of Million-Year-Old Ice
The time capsule is ice that froze 1.5 million years ago, capturing tiny bubbles of air, bringing a sample of the ancient atmosphere through time to the present day.
There are already dozens of ice cores from Antarctica and Greenland. They are tubes of ice, sometimes several kilometers long, drilled from the ice sheet, which reveal a timeline of what the atmosphere was like over hundreds of millennia.
Together those cores paint a detailed picture of the history of our atmosphere and climate. They’ve demonstrated the tight relationship that exists between carbon dioxide concentrations and temperature, but also how unusual the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are now.
They take us back through time to about 800,000 years ago, through ice age after ice age. Although 800 millenia tells us a lot about carbon dioxide and temperature, the ice core record stops at a crucial moment.
http://www.climatecentral.org/news/climate-scientists-search-for-million-year-old-ice-20130
