Researchers from the University of Manitoba have extracted what is believed to be the deepest ice core ever in Canadian history.
The 613-metre ice core from the Müller Ice Cap on Axel Heiberg Island, Nunavut, was extracted in 2–3 metre sections over a period of several weeks.
The ice core is expected to offer insights in the climatic past of the Arctic, according to project lead Dorthe Dahl-Jensen.
“When you drill an ice core, you drill from annual layer to annual layer, deeper and deeper, back in time,” she told The Epoch Times in a phone interview.
“When you reach the bedrock, then you get the oldest ice,” she said.
Dahl-Jensen said the ice core is believed to include materials that are more than 10,000 years old.
“When we go so far back in time, we’re going through a lot of different time periods where it’s been colder and when it’s been warmer,” she said.
The patterns can be used to forecast possible future weather patterns.
She said they will be able to learn how sea ice has changed over time, and get samples of the atmosphere by extracting air bubbles caught in the ice.
Researchers finished the extraction on May 16. They worked in temperatures that fell below minus 30 degrees, and even had to wait out a Arctic windstorm that made working outside unsafe.
The team consisted of researchers from Canada, Denmark, and Australia.
The ice core segments were moved to the Canadian Ice Core Laboratory in Edmonton. Scientific analysis is planned to start this fall.
“We’re going to take a stick of the ice core all the way through and melt it on a little plate, and look at the impurity concentrations down through the ice core,” Dahl-Jensen said.
1.2 Million-Year-Old Ice
Dahl-Jensen was also part of a research team that drilled a 2,800-metre long ice core from Antarctica in January.Dated back more than 1.2 million years, the ice was dug up in the Antarctic ice sheet, with the team hitting bedrock beneath the ice.
At the time, she said the achievement was “monumental” for climate and environmental science.
“The ice core provides the longest continuous climate record known, and we hope it will help us understand the connections between Earth’s carbon cycle and temperature changes throughout history,” Dahl-Jensen said.
The project was funded by the European Commission, with support from national partners across Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom.
