Researchers have extracted ice from the peninsula for the first time dating back to 1.2 million years ago. Very far from the previous record, 400,000 years earlier.
What secrets will she reveal? An international team, including scientists from Grenoble, has just taken ice from Antarctica dating back to 1.2 million years ago. The previous record stopped at ice dated 800,000 years ago, 400,000 years earlier.
To achieve this, they drilled the ice to a depth of 2,800 meters; the operation required 200 days of work, and four drilling seasons, to go to the depths of the Arctic ice cap.
Researchers are thus opening up to well-kept secrets about the history of the climate, in a context of climate change which makes any new information on the subject valuable.
“There are other paleoclimatic records, notably marine sediments, but what the ice cores provide is that they have trapped small air bubbles which are samples of the past atmosphere. It is enough to analyze these air bubbles to reconstruct the composition of the past atmosphere, for example the CO2 levels. One of the hypotheses is that CO2 already played a role in the climate at the time. explains Frédéric Parrenin, paleoclimatologist, CNRS research director at the Institute of Environmental Geosciences in Grenoble, on Franceinfo.
The CNRS and the French Polar Institute
The past sensitivity of the climate to the influence of greenhouse gases should make it possible to plan for the future.
Another challenge begins, after the feat of January 9: transport the samples to Europe without breaking the cold chain, and make them talk.
In France, the CNRS and the French Polar Institute are involved in the project.
The operation was carried out as part of the Beyond Epica project, which brings together 12 institutions from 10 European countries, for funding of 11 million euros.
