1.5 Million Year Old Ice to be Melted to Unlock Mystery

An ice core that may be older than 1.5 million years has arrived in the UK where scientists will melt it to unlock vital information about Earth's climate.

In January this year, in a remarkable feat of engineering, a team of European scientists extracted a 1.74 mile long (2.8km) cylinder, or core, of ice - that's longer than eight Eiffel Towers stacked on top of one another - from the Antarctic. It has now arrived in England.

The glassy cylinder - currently inside the -23C freezer room at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge - is the planet's oldest ice and was drilled from deep inside the Antarctic ice sheet. Frozen inside is thousands of years of new information that scientists say could "revolutionise" what we know about climate change.

"This is a completely unknown period of our Earth's history," says Dr Liz Thomas, a paleoclimatologist and head of ice core research at the British Antarctic Survey.

For seven weeks, Dr Thomas and the team will slowly melt the ice, releasing ancient dust, volcanic ash, and even tiny marine algae called diatoms that were locked inside when water turned to ice. These materials can tell scientists about wind patterns, temperature, and sea levels more than a million years ago.

Tubes will feed the liquid into machines in a lab next door that is one of the only places in the world that can do this science. They hope to find evidence of a period of time more than 800,000 years ago when carbon dioxide concentrations may have been naturally as high or even higher than they are now, according to Dr Thomas.

This could help them understand what will happen in our future as our planet responds to warming gases trapped in our atmosphere. "Our climate system has been through so many different changes that we really need to be able to go back in time to understand these different processes and different tipping points," she says.

Experts want to understand what happened in a period 900,000 to 1.2 million years ago called the Mid-Pleistocene Transition. At this time, the length of the cycle between cold glacial and warm interglacials switched from being 41,000 years to 100,000 years. But scientists have never understood why. Maybe they will soon.

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