The Secret Life of Bubbles

Can million-year-old bubbles solve an Ice Age mystery?

Scientists recently have successfully drilled and retrieved a 9,186-foot-long (2,800 meters) ice core sample from Antarctica.

The piece, probably the world’s oldest ice at 1.2 million years old, extended so deep that it reached the bedrock beneath the Antarctic ice sheet, according to CNN.

The team of scientists, from the fourth campaign of the “Beyond EPICA – Oldest Ice” project, worked in temperatures of -31°C to extract the ice core from Little Dome C, one of the most extreme locations on the planet, according to BBC News.

The Institute of Polar Sciences of the National Research Council of Italy coordinated the project and is funded by the European Commission. It aims to resolve one of climate science’s most complex mysteries, the changing of ice cycles, according to the institute.

The ice core, discovered through bubbles found in the ice, is expected to offer insights into the Mid-Pleistocene Transition, a remarkable period between 900,000 and 1.2 million years ago when glacial cycles slowed down from 41,000-year intervals to 100,000 years, the researchers said.

Some say our ancestors almost went extinct during that period, known as the “ice age,” noted CNN.

“During that period of time, there was a bottleneck in the evolution of human beings, and about 1,300 individuals were left in the world planet,” said Carlo Barbante, professor at Italy’s Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and coordinator of Beyond EPICA, in an interview with NPR.

The team has sliced the core into 3.2-foot pieces stored in insulated boxes so that the ice and its bubbles may be studied, said Barbante. The samples will be transported to various European institutions such as the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge for analysis, via the icebreaker research vessel Lara Bassi, maintaining the -50°C cold chain.

“The air bubbles trapped within the ice core provide a direct snapshot of past atmospheric composition, including greenhouse gas concentrations like carbon dioxide and methane,” Barbante told CNN.

The discovery is the longest continuous record of our past climate from an ice core, and could reveal the connection between the carbon cycle and the temperature of the planet, researchers said.

Data from other ice cores have been vital to researchers in understanding how the current rise in temperatures is linked to greenhouse gas emissions. Now, scientists wanted to go Beyond Epica, even further back in time.

Scientists do not know if there is a link between the near-extinction of humans during the Ice Age and the climate, researchers said, but the climate data extrapolated from the bubbles could help solve this mystery.