{"id":470,"date":"2016-01-18T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-01-17T23:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/site.uit.no\/cage\/2016\/01\/18\/arctic-ocean-preparations-in-the-hunt-for-the-oldest-ice-in-antarctica\/"},"modified":"2023-04-04T10:33:44","modified_gmt":"2023-04-04T08:33:44","slug":"arctic-ocean-preparations-in-the-hunt-for-the-oldest-ice-in-antarctica","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/site.uit.no\/cage\/2016\/01\/18\/arctic-ocean-preparations-in-the-hunt-for-the-oldest-ice-in-antarctica\/","title":{"rendered":"Arctic Ocean preparations in the hunt for the oldest ice in Antarctica"},"content":{"rendered":"

Scientists are getting ready to drill for an ice core holding the oldest ice on planet. They want to reach 1,5 million year old ice with traces of\u00a0past climate changes.<\/strong><\/h4>\n
Text: Maja Sojtaric<\/h6>\n

<\/p>\n

Current record for oldest ice core in the world is 800.000 years old. The core from East Antarctica’s plateau, is over three kilometers long, and contains snowfall and trapped air from the past. It took a total of eight years to drill during Antarctic summer seasons.<\/p>\n

To break this record and delve deeper into climate history, scientists need to be inventive. New, groundbreaking instrumentation needs to be developed to make it possible to reveal climate secrets frozen deep in the Antarctic ice.<\/p>\n

An ideal place to test and proof the performance of such an instrument is the Arctic Ocean and this was done during a recent CAGE-cruise.<\/p>\n

Melting through kilometres of ice<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ice cores are spectacular records of past climate change because they contain traces of climate gases, such as methane. Most spectrometers<\/a> that perform these measurements are bulky and usually installed in laboratories. A team in Grenoble has now developed a compact laser spectrometer and gas extraction system, which, linked together, can do very fast and precise measurements.<\/p>\n

The instrument will be mounted on a pioneering type of coring equipment, capable of reaching truy ancient ice.<\/p>\n

“We are miniaturising the lab to bring it down the ice sheet and measure in-situ while coring\u201d, explains engineer Jack Triest.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong>He is one of the members of the SUBGLACIOR project, which is being developed at the Laboratoire Glaciologie et G\u00e9ophysique de l\u2019Environnement (LGGE)<\/a> and National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS)<\/a> in Grenoble, France.<\/p>\n

Instead of conventional drilling, SUBGLACIOR<\/a> aims to melt<\/em> its way through several kilometres of the Antarctic ice sheet. While under way it will be measuring methane concentrations and isotope ratios in the melted water. These climate signatures will be measured using the embedded laser spectrometer specially developed by Roberto Grilli at the Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire de Physique.<\/p>\n