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

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."

Comments

Oil

[jamesh]

I hope we find some oil there too. By accident of course.

Cores

[symbolset]

In the Beaufort Sea just north of Canada's Yukon there's a spot that has been covered in ice in the winter and exposed to the sun in the summer, for a billion years - give or take some ice ages - back to when the substrate was actually near the equator. And the sediment there on the sea floor has more to tell us about our climate, global insolation and biological action than these antarctic cores do. Worse still, oil drillers are actively drilling in this area and willing to give up the cores for free as they are an unavoidable byproduct of their operations. Why are we not hearing about the research into these arctic sediment cores?

Re:Cores

[dargaud]

There's plenty of papers about them, but they give different scopes. Usually Antarctic cores are more precise and less sensitive to random fluctuations. They also measure more things (temperature, humidity, direct CO2 levels...). In the case of TFA, a 40m core is less than impressive if you compare it to 4km long cores from Vostok or Concordia, but the gist of the article is that it will be very precise for each year.

Re:Ah, I'm not sure what's so Earth shattering

[riverat1]

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.

2,000 years old... Holy grail...

[White Flame]

This is a cover up for some sort of religious artifact expedition!

It belongs in a museum!