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Australia Plans To Drill 2,000-Year-Old Ice Core In Antarctica

Posted by timothy on from the best-place-for-it-really dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Australia announced Saturday a new project to drill a deep ice core in Antarctica, which may shed light on past climatic conditions in the continent. The project, Aurora Basin North project, will involve researchers drilling a 2,000-year-old ice core, in order to search for the scientific 'holy grail' of the ice core."

1 of 62 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Ah, I'm not sure what's so Earth shattering by riverat1 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Greenland ice cores only go back 100,000 years or so. The oldest ice cores that I'm aware of are around 800,000 years from Antarctica. The attraction of this new site is apparently the snowfall is greater in this area than in most of Antarctica and so the layers in the ice core will be thicker allowing more precision in the measurements. They're saying this is preliminary research that could eventually lead to million year old ice cores.