Antarctic Ice Core Contains Unrivaled Detail of Past Climate

           

Scientists, using a special drilling technology made at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, have drilled an ice core 3,405 meters long from a research station in central West Antarctica. When different snowfalls occur and ice layers are built up around it, chemicals and gases which were in the atmosphere get trapped inside, giving us the ability to find, for example, the amount and type of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere between 30,000 and 65,000 years ago. Samples from this core will be distributed to over 20 university and science labs in the United States to make measurements. These measurements are known to show not just climate in Antarctica, but also the rest of the world. Findings so far indicate that the fossil fuel pollution in the atmosphere today is the worst it's been in at least 800,000 years.

For more on this topic as well as other science topics, visit http://www.biologynews.net/archives/2013/02/05/antarctic_ice_core_contains_unrivaled_detail_of_past_climate.html

Scientific Themes

1. Science is collaborative

            This article shows that science is collaborative by describing how it takes more than one person to analyze findings. For example, the ice core will be sent to, "more than 20 U.S. university and national laboratories that make the measurements."

2. Science is based on evidence

            This article supports that science is based on evidence because these scientists drilled the core to do tests on it and get hard evidence what global climate conditions were, instead of the opposite, which would be trusting in oral traditions and in what bed time stories might have told us about the past million years.

3. Role of motivation and curiosity

            Motivation and curiosity play a very large role in this article and in this research study. I find it very interesting to see what the environment was like hundreds of thousands of years ago. Also, at the end of the article it states that, "The team stopped drilling 165 feet above where the ice contacts the rock below in order to avoid contaminating the water at the bottom of the ice, which has been isolated from the rest of the biosphere for at least 100,000 years." I immediately was very curious about that water that hasn't been touched for 100,000 years. What does it look like? What does it taste like? Are there any chemicals in it that we don't find in regular ocean water anymore? It's questions like these that make the role of motivation and curiosity a huge factor in science.

Sam Pahl