According to Mehr news agency, citing Science alertA group of researchers led by Sara your shape From the Institute of Oceanography Woodshole They have succeeded from the depth of a few hundred meters of the natural glacier in the Alan region Hillsto extract samples that are about six million years old.
your shape in this load says:
“Ice cores are like time machines; They allow us to see the face of the Earth in the distant past. Our findings from Allen HillsIt has taken us to an era much older than what we imagined so far.”
Because planet Earth is geologically active, finding evidence of ancient climates has always been difficult. But Antarctica is an exception to this rule; There, the continuous accumulation of ice and snow traps and freezes the material, forming a capsule of Earth’s climate history.
By examining the vertical cores extracted from several hundreds of meters of ice, the researchers were able to reconstruct a detailed picture of the ancient environmental conditions of Antarctica.
In the Allen area HillsThere is a valuable and unique density of blue ice. These ices have been compressed over time and due to the compression of air bubbles and the growth of ice crystals, they absorb the redder wavelengths of light; For this reason, a special blue halo can be seen in this area. Since in Allen Hills Due to erosion and sublimation processes, new snow does not accumulate, very old ice is located near the surface.
your shape He explains that this phenomenon is the result of a combination of strong winds, extreme cold and the special topography of the region. Winds disperse the fresh snow and cold air slows the movement of the ice to almost a halt. These conditions, Alan Hills making it one of the best places in the world to find ancient ice at a shallow depth.
Although large fossilized air bubbles are absent in these samples, microscopic pockets of air remain in the crystal structure of the ice, providing valuable information on the composition of Earth’s past atmosphere.
As part of the COLDEX project affiliated with the US National Science Foundation, three ice cores were drilled at depths of 150, 159 and 206 meters. The goal of this work is to obtain ices as old as ages Pliocene (Pliocene) was; A period that ended about 2.6 million years ago.
The results of the argon isotope dating test showed that the deepest extracted core is about six million years old and at the end of the era miocene (Miocene), that is, it belongs to nearly 5.3 million years ago. Other samples were younger and data from late intervals miocene For most of the era Pliocene particle for direct object about had
In the next step, the research team was able to estimate the approximate temperature of the earth at each point in time by analyzing the oxygen isotope. The findings showed that six million years ago, the temperature of the Antarctic was about 12 degrees Celsius warmer than today, and the cooling process to reach the current temperature was very slow and gradual.
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