This special mission seeks to better understand the evolution and future of our planet by studying how the ice caps are responding to climate change.
Several researchers from the Center for Oldest Ice Exploration (Coldex) — a US mission studying the world’s oldest ice samples — released video on Dec. 23 of a camera diving into a 93-meter-deep hole in Antarctica, SkyNews reports.
The goal: to find the “oldest ice in the world” in order to better understand the development and future of the Earth’s climate by studying the resilience of the Antarctic ice caps to global warming.
Thanks to the analysis of the air bubbles trapped at depth in the ice, the Coldex can thus determine the amount of carbon dioxide in the air at a given point in time.
In this hole, drilled twenty years ago in Allan Hills in East Antarctica, scientists have so far been able to analyze fragments that are 800,000 years old.
But they don’t want to stop there. They hope to “push back [ce record] three or four million years or even more,” said Edward Brook, climate scientist and director of Coldex at the Antarctic Sun, quoted by British media.