Deep Antarctic drilling will reveal climate secrets trapped in 1.5 million-year-old ice

Scientists will have to drill at a depth of nearly 3km to retrieve some of the oldest ice that can tell us about the past and future of climate. Image credit - NASA/Michael Studinger

by Richard Gray  An ambitious mission to drill into the Antarctic ice sheet to extract some of the oldest ice on the planet will provide vital clues about a mysterious shift in the behaviour of our planet’s climate. Drilling into the ice of Antarctica is like going back in time. Frozen within it are relics … Read more

‘Most ice on Earth is very close to melting conditions’

Even if we change our emissions now, we are committed to a lot of ice melt, says Prof. Kääb. Image credit - Sharada Prasad CS, licensed under CC BY 2.0

We need to understand how glaciers are shrinking in order to better adapt to climate change impacts such as changes to water supply, landslides and avalanches, says Professor Andreas Kääb, a glacier expert from the University of Oslo in Norway.  Measuring ice melt and the unprecedented changes in our cryosphere – the frozen parts of … Read more