A few days ago there was an article out of Science.com talking about the oldest ice core dug to-date. If you want to read the article for yourself, please see the following link:
The thing that excites me about this from a scientific perspective is that scientist are able to see more historical weather patterns through the ice. Also, the air composition at the time of the various ice freezes at the different layers can tell what the climate was like. A large thing that can be found is the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is a metric that most scientist use to measure the warmth on the planet at different periods of time.
Both images above retrieved from the article: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/08/record-shattering-27-million-year-old-ice-core-reveals-start-ice-ages
The article says this ice core is 1.7 million years older that the next oldest discovery. I see this as a very important discovery. I’m eager to hear updates on what the scientists are able to provide in terms of research that can hopefully lead to insight on how humans should expect our future climate. It’s crazy to think that a super long ice cube could provide so much insight into our past.
If you want to know the impact of this discovery I recommend you read up on historic gas composition levels in previous ice core samples. To date, the scientific community has no measured CO2 concentration in the air greater than what we have now. This new sample might be able to show if the CO2 concentration has been higher or not.
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