Breakthrough Antarctic ice extraction 'an enormous victory,' U of Manitoba researcher says

An international team of scientists, including a researcher from the University of Manitoba, has drilled what's believed to be the world's longest continuous record of ice at a remote site in Antarctica — a breakthrough expected to reveal insights into Earth's historical climate patterns going back over 1.2 million years.

Scientists hope the research project, which drilled down to the bedrock beneath the Antarctic ice sheet, will shed light on the planet's atmospheric history through greenhouse gases preserved in air bubbles trapped within the 2,800-metre ice core the scientists extracted, the University of Manitoba said in a news release Thursday.

"For us that's been part of the project, it's an enormous victory," said Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Arctic Sea Ice, Freshwater-Marine Coupling and Climate Change at the University of Manitoba.

"It's absolutely amazing. It's a dream."

While Dahl-Jensen works at the U of M, she's also affiliated with a team based in Denmark that was involved in the latest ice core project. 

The research project involved collaboration between scientific and logistical teams from across Europe. It 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.

She said the ice core extraction was the result of extensive work using radar to map out a spot to drill, which the researchers believed would have ice from the long-gone time period they were looking for. 

"This is trapped atmospheric air from that time. So imagine standing with air that's 1.5 million years old in your hand," she said. "And we can measure the greenhouse gases that there was at that time."

While much older ice has been found by scientists from other parts of the world, the recent ice core is the longest continuous climate sequence ever extracted, according to the U of M.

John Higgins, a member of the U.S. National Science Foundation Center for Oldest Ice Research and Exploration, or COLDEX, said the core "is super exciting for climate scientists all over."

"[Ice cores] are really the closest you can get to going back in the time machine and being able to measure what the atmosphere was like in the past," he said.

He was part of a different exploration project that has extracted roughly six-million-year-old ice in a different part of Antarctica among its discoveries.

While that goes further back in time, Higgins said one way to think of the CODEX discoveries is "as pages or chapters of a book that is much older," while the continuous record found by the European research project "is kind of a whole book that goes back 1.2 million years."

"We are in the practice of kind of finding bits of ice that are much older, but our kind of incomplete books are only part of a book," he said.

Dahl-Jensen said groups from other countries, including Australia, the United States and Japan, have been doing work similar to her team's, but they were able to come out ahead in that race.

"We are far in front of all the others. And of course, that's really cool," she said.

Look to the past helps understand Earth's climate future

The ice core recovered by Dahl-Jensen and her colleagues was removed in pieces before being shipped out for research purposes, and can be re-assembled later in sequence.

"It's like having a measuring tape. It's all in one part," Dahl-Jensen said. 

That information from the past could help scientists better understand what's happening with the planet's climate in the present day — and what might happen in the future.

"So in many ways, we are also going into the old world where we find the analog to what we are going into right now," she said.

Higgins agrees.

The ice cores could help scientists understand the effects on Earth's climate system of larger amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, he said, by studying the role they played three to four million years ago, when the planet was substantially warmer, and much later during the last ice age. 

"It provides important context for needing to reduce emissions of CO2 now and thinking about Earth's climate future," Higgins said.