Pope Francis : Climate Scientists in search of the Holy Grail Blog :
Climate scientists step up search for 'holy grail' of million-year-old ice :
Somewhere deep below the ice in Antarctica lies a time capsule. It’s the holy grail of climate science and promises to reveal the past and future of Earth’s atmosphere. And right now, scientists are meeting in Hobart to work out a plan to dig it up.
The time capsule is ice that froze 1.5m years ago, capturing tiny bubbles of air, bringing a sample of the ancient atmosphere through time to the present day.
Together those cores paint a detailed picture of the history of our atmosphere and climate. They’ve demonstrated the tight relationship that exists between carbon dioxide concentrations and temperature, but also how unusual the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are now.
They take us back through time to about 800,000 years ago, through ice age after ice age. Although 800 millenia tells us a lot about carbon dioxide and temperature, the ice core record stops at a crucial moment.
We know what temperatures were like on Earth going back millions of years. That’s because the air temperatures leave a unique signature in the sediment at the bottom of the ocean, as well as in other “proxy” systems like ice and tree rings.
Examining that sediment, scientists have found that a strange thing happened about one million years ago. The cycle of ice ages sped up. Rather than happening every 100,000 years, they suddenly started happening every 40,000 years.
So teams around the world have been busily modelling the flow of ice on Antarctica, to figure out a place where ice is likely to have sat undisturbed for a million years.
Examining the Rate of Climatic Change in Earth's historical past due to natural processes of Evolution.
Scientists, then can compare that information with the radicalization of Humanity's induced Industrial Revolution, and it's profound affects on Earth's Climate. Gauging how radical the Climate has changed to to the onset of Human activity.
Key issues such as Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide saturation linked with Global Ocean Acidification may assist in the basis of future Climate Change Modelling to accurately predict radical affects Humans will have on Planet Earth in the near Future.
