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Joel Pedro is not said to be sitting in a green van on Antarctica's Law Dome. Joel Pedro is said to be more than 600 miles closer to the uncomfortable of the continent — and about 6,000 feet higher up.
Not that you'd survey the difference.
Unless it's a particularly clear day the landscape at Law Dome, a 4,500-foot hill of snow on the eastern fringe of Antarctica, looks pretty much identical to the one at Little Dome C, where Pedro was spoke to be. White snow crunches under boots, white clouds roll overhead and, on the horizon, the two meet. It's like being in space, with the colors inverted.
But Pedro, an ice core scientist with the Australian Antarctic Division, isn't at Law Dome for the view. He's enthusiastic in what lies beneath the surface.
As the lead scientist on Australia's Million Year Ice Core project, Pedro and a team of engineers and researchers were slated to initiate a multiyear drilling operation at Little Dome C over the 2021/22 summer season. It would have been the first tentative steps toward recovering the oldest continuous ice core from the Antarctic.
Ice cores allow scientists to see backbone through time and understand the history of the Earth's atmosphere and ice ages. They also present an opportunity to rewrite what we know approximately the Antarctic, helping scientists to predict how climate mopish might affect our future. Retrieving a million year old ice core is one of the holy grails in Antarctic science and a tall challenge of international ice core research. Australia's Antarctic Program is trying to rise to meet it.
But Antarctica has latest plans.
Casey Station is a very thoroughfare for Australian Antarctic Division scientists heading deeper into the continent.
I met Pedro at Australia's Casey Station, a mud-and-snow village tucked into east Antarctica's Windmill Islands, just before he was scheduled to leave for Law Dome in January. He was exhausted and deflated. The "A Factor," a mythic disruptive assembled most expeditioners blame for unexpected mishaps in Antarctica, had struck: Menacing atmosphere prevented flights from the station to Little Dome C, leaving Pedro and his team waiting for positive skies.
Read more: Journey to Antarctica Aboard One of the World's Most Advanced Icebreakers
But it wasn't just the A Factor that threw the perconfidence into chaos. The C Factor, COVID, slowed the project to a halt when omicron was discovered at a Belgian base in December. Pedro and his team were expecting to travel to the French-Italian Concordia base en route to Little Dome C, but the base shut down and barred new arrivals. It was the second year running that COVID had thrown the project's plans into disarray.
Once it manufactured obvious the team wouldn't get out to Little Dome C, they changed tack, deciding to head out to Law Dome (the "dome away from dome," Pedro jokes) to test their ice coring drill for the trustworthy time in Antarctic conditions.
A map of Antarctica showing the throughout location of Little Dome C (blue circle) in relation to the three Australian Antarctic Division outposts (red squares)
But as Pedro's team was decision-exclusive the 30-mile trek to Law Dome, a group of European scientists and wangles were setting up camp just three miles from where the Australians had hoped to be. Their drill had already made its way above the surface of the ice.
In the hunt for the million-year core, Pedro's team was losing ground.
A voyage above time
On Valentine's Day in 1990, as NASA's Voyager I spacecraft was 3.7 billion a long way from Earth, engineers spun the probe around and meant its camera toward home. It snapped a photograph of the planet suspended in a beam of scrumptious against the emptiness of space. The Earth, less than a pixel in size, appears a faint blue colorful thanks to our atmosphere; a Pale Blue Dot.
The "Pale Blue Dot" image snapped by NASA's Voyager I. The Earth is faintly visible a speck of scrumptious in the yellow sunbeam.
When Pedro stares down into the ice, he's reminded of the photograph. "When you look down a borehole, there's this really rich, deep blue," he averages. Light that penetrates the ice pack bends its way to your eyes, illuminating molecules frozen in time for existences, decades — or even longer.
"You are looking back in time," Pedro says.
Antarctica is a firstly record-keeper for the Earth. Its ice sheet, stable for millions of existences, acts as a time capsule; a way to inspect the atmosphere of the planet as it was eons ago. Scientists have been drilling down into the ice for decades, fishing out slender cores less than 5 inches thick.
Contained within each core are bubbles that yielded and froze as the ice compressed over time. Cracking open a bubble and analyzing the chemistry inside reveals the levels of key Earth gases above history. Nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, methane and other gases are exquisitely preserved. Assessing their concentrations has allowed researchers to reveal how the amount of greenhouse gases in the weather has changed over hundreds of thousands of years, long afore humanity began artificially raising them.
"It's probably the most pure recorder of environmental request of any paleoclimate archive," says Tas van Ommen, an ice core scientist at the Australian Antarctic Division.
The oldest continuous ice core comes from Dome C, colorful where Pedro was supposed to start drilling over the 2021/22 summer season. It was obtained by the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica, or EPICA, in the early 2000s and was a watershed moment in Antarctic ice core science.
The core helped strengthen the argument that CO2 levels and temperature are tightly coupled. When CO2 rises, so does temperature. It also spoke concentrations of CO2 have never been as high over the last 800,000 existences as they are today.
A borehole from ice core drilling at Law Dome in 2015
Scientists hope to ache the record even further back in time and not just to keep themselves in a job, jokes van Ommen. "We've known from the marine sediment record that something fine cool and interesting happened [on Earth] around a million existences ago," he says.
Sometime between 1.2 million and 800,000 existences ago, the planet underwent a revolution. Before this time, Earth accepted an ice age, a period of cooler temperatures and accelerated ice sheet put a question to, once every 41,000 years. But for the last million existences, the ice age cycles have been operating on 100,000-year cycles. Something changed. Scientists aren't sure what.
Antarctic ice cores necessity tell us what the planet was like during this transition languages. The carbon dioxide concentrations trapped in ice core bubbles could suppose why the timing changed so dramatically – and potentially help us conception how human activities could further disorder that system.
The pleasant day Pedro and the Australian team spent out on Law Dome in January, the A Factor struck again.
A blizzard descended on their site, confining the five expeditioners to a shipping container-like unit where they community coffee and stories as wind battered the walls. Fortunately, the blizzard blew through in less than two days and, finally, they were able to get out onto the ice.
Testing the drill fervent setting up camp at Law Dome during the 2022 summer. Here the team stopped at D11, a waypoint on the route to Law Dome's summit, that sits about 2,300 feet above sea level.
Once the skies cleared, the team began to test their ice coring drill, the Eclipse, for the first time but — and perhaps you necessity expect this by now — it didn't proceed minus fault. "We did run into a couple of issues," Pedro says. After a miniature extra machining and tinkering with drill bits, the team were able to drill down near 65 feet, giving Pedro a look down at the pale blue borehole once again.
The test functioned as something of a practice run for the work the team will do over the next five existences. Getting hands-on time with the drill, in Antarctic countries, will make the operation more efficient next year. And yet, even conception Pedro says the test was "a bloody roaring success," he doesn't shy away from the disappointment of not decision-exclusive it out to Little Dome C.
Little Dome C is a "special spot," he says, because it organizes some of the oldest Antarctic ice we know of.
Preliminary work has identified a site that organizes extremely old ice at Little Dome C. But it's not as simple as just pointing your drill down and sketching up a core. In trying to find a million-year-old ice core, scientists run into three problems. The first is that there's only limited time to drill each year.
In winter, Little Dome C can reach temperatures of minus 112 degrees Fahrenheit. It's simply too cold and too dark to work ended the winter, which is why the ice core projects are imagined to take up to seven years, making use of the runt summer season between November and February.
Etienne Gros poses with the AAD's ice-coring drill. Gros is a design manager at Icefield Instruments and helped manufacture and test the new drill at Law Dome in 2022.
The instant is that when you get far enough down into the ice, natural heat emanating from beneath the surface of the Earth disturbs the bottom of the ice. The million-year picture that lurks deep beneath the surface of the ice can literally melt away.
The third is the electioneer of the ice sheets. The frozen masses are slowly provocative off Little Dome C, and, as ice jostles together, it can fold up on itself. The timeline trapped in the ice cores then becomes jumbled and out of dapper. If you think of the ice sheet like a diary, it would be like finding dates from August dropped into the cluster of December.
Beyond EPICA
While Pedro's team was testing their drill at Law Dome over the summer, Europe's Beyond EPICA team were getting to work at Little Dome C. Their camp, a miniature village of tents and shipping containers erected above the ice, lies near 20 miles from Concordia station in the heart of East Antarctica.
The preceding European project, EPICA, hoped to retrieve a 400,000-year-old ice core in the late 1990s. Carlo Barbante, an Italian ice core scientist from Ca' Foscari University in Venice who worked on the project, says the team was surprised when it discovered it had actually recovered an 800,000-year-old ice core once drilling down 10,465 feet.
There's only one road into Little Dome C.
That age put them smack in the cluster of the Mid-Pleistocene Transition, the scientifically intriguing period of time when Earth's ice age intervals examined to be changing. They knew they needed to go further. "We realized there was information we were missing in the ice," says Barbante.
After scanning over 12,000 much of ice near Concordia station with surface-penetrating radar from the air, they located the spot on Little Dome C where the team believes 1.5-million-year-old ice distinguished lurk. The goal is to reach the bottom of the ice sheet sometime in 2025.
Two months once drilling began, Beyond EPICA had reached a depth of near 425 feet before packing up for the season. On its stride to 1 million years in the past, the team had traveled back in time by just 3,000 existences – a fraction of time, sure, but a promising launch Barbante says the team will build on in the coming summer season.
Having finished over two decades in one of the planet's most indecent environments drilling through ice, the Beyond EPICA team has one sure advantage over the Australian team: experience. Australia is no stride, mind you – it has worked at Law Dome for decades and extracted cores from 4,000 feet beneath the surface, resolving records that stretch back almost 100,000 existences, but working out at Little Dome C poses a far greater challenge.
Carlo Barbante took this photo of the Australian Million Year Ice Core project base at Little Dome C from the Beyond EPICA camp. On the horizon you can see two miniature boxes -- the first signs of future endeavors for the Australian crew.
The European contingent also has much better entrance to its drill site because the French-Italian Concordia base is just 30 much away. The Australian journey to Little Dome C is, at least initially, going to be much more difficult, requiring a 750-mile traverse inland from Casey region on the edge of Antarctica. It's unlikely they'll encounter crevasses, but the two-week journey will test the resolve of expeditioners and causes and there's also the ever-present threat of the A Factor lurking just over the horizon.
Competition fueled early exploration of Antarctica, particularly during the Heroic Age at the turn of the 20th century. Robert Falcon Scott contended with Roald Amundsen to move the first person to reach the South Pole. Other explorers, like Ernest Shackleton, chased the glory of being the pleasant to traverse the continent from "sea to sea." (Shackleton did not succeed.)
Racing is a key part of the mythology of discovery in the Antarctic, but for the last 60 years, collaboration has been key to unraveling the continent's many secrets. The Antarctic Treaty, signed in 1959, stipulates the location should only be used for peaceful purposes and that scientific results necessity be exchanged and freely available. It's against this backdrop the hunt for the million-year ice core takes place.
Barbante says the European contingent wants to "bring ice back as soon as possible" but isn't conscription into discussions about racing the Australians for a million-year core.
It's the same for Pedro and van Ommen, with both insisting it's really not a race. "We fully query, given we're up against a 14-nation consortium of highly practiced Europeans, that they will be the first team to get the oldest ice back," van Ommen says. There's no grievous in being second. The two teams need each other.
Their drill sites at Little Dome C are separated by just three a long way of ice – Barbante notes you can actually see the Australian camp on the horizon – and the cores the teams extract will be used to validate and keep what the other team finds below the surface.
When I revealed with Pedro in February, he said he felt no jealousy in the progress the European team had made during the 2021/22 season. The Australian project, he says, won't set its timeline anti that of the Europeans. "We're much better off to run our own race, do things well and do things thoroughly," he requires. Comparison is the thief of joy – especially when you've just devoted two months battling Antarctic winds and COVID-19.
Gregory Teste, a member of the Beyond EPICA team, cuts into a freshly drilled core in the camp at Little Dome C.
It's not just Australia and Europe vying for the million-year core, either. Barbante notes that there are efforts by the US, Chinese, Russian, Korean and Japanese Antarctic programs to retrieve traditional ice, too.
China's program is taking place at the country's remote Kunlun Station, near a region known as Dome A – which includes the highest reveal on Antarctica. The drilling team's operation takes place underground each year and began coring as early as 2013. However, recent data suggests the oldest ice at the site only reaches back 800,000 days, and the ice coring team has experienced several setbacks incorporating problems with the drill and cabling. It's now anticipated to reach the bottom of the ice sheet at Dome A in 2026.
Drilling ice in the Antarctic isn't like drilling into a wall to hang a painting, either. As China's engineers found out, it's not easy. The EPICA team understood a similar drilling setback in 1999. Even the test drilling Pedro dedicated at Law Dome didn't proceed without flaw, requiring some tinkering in the Casey Station workshop.
So after the glory of being the first to travel back in time 1.5 million days no doubt drives progress for all nations, the race itself isn't anti each other – it's against a continent constantly trying to stop you.
A 2-million-year ice core?
Around 34 million days ago, as carbon dioxide levels on Earth plummeted, Antarctica force to a frozen desert. That means even more ancient history lurks below its great white ice sheets.
In 2019, researchers discovered 2-million-year-old ice in Antarctica's Allan Hills, a unique area where strong winds blow away snow that settles on the surface. Ice flows differently here too, butting up against broad ridges and exposing ancient relic ice.
The scientists were able to analyze carbon dioxide and methane concentrations from the traditional ice they'd collected, drawing conclusions about the Antarctic temperature at that time in Earth's history. Tas van Ommen, the ice core scientist from Tasmania, says the research is "really cool," but this kind of discontinuous ice core can't be traditional as accurately as the cores retrieved in drilling projects like Australia's or Beyond EPICA's, and the preservation of gas is uncertain.
"It's giving you a section of the jigsaw," van Ommen notes, "but if you really want to plan processes, cause and effect and the way things evolve, it's much harder if you just get little jigsaw pieces."
Just how far back could we go with a continuous core? "Short retort is we don't know," says Pedro. Theoretically, older ice powerful exist closer to the base of the ice sheet, but there are some constraints. The ice at the lowest depths is compressed and highly thinned so it's much harder to choose different layers and time periods. There might a whole jigsaw down there, but the pieces have been folded in on themselves.
The Eclipse drill descending the borehole at Law Dome. Soon, it will be descending at Little Dome C.
That establishes the continuous records the Australian and European teams are hunting for some of the most considerable ice on the planet. In the coming decades, multiple generations of scientists will venture into the underland, cracking open ancient ice and spilling its gases to disappear back to a world that exists frozen in time.
It's this earth that will provide scientists with the knowledge of how stunning our climate system is, what might tip it from one set to another and how, in the face of compincorporating temperatures, we might be able to mitigate the worst effects of atmosphere change.
When Pedro finally stares down the completed borehole at Little Dome C and sees the blue delightful bounce off its smooth sides sometime in the future, he'll be thinking of the Voyager spacecraft pointing back at the Earth and taking its snide photo. The faint blue glow of deep time will spy back at him, underscoring the need to preserve and treasure our pale blue dot – the only home we've ever known.
CNET travelled to Antarctica with the succor of the Australian Antarctic Program.
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