What do Greenland ice cores Reveal?
The ice cores are examined in laboratories with a series of analyses that reveal past climate. The content of the heavy oxygen isotope O18 in the ice cores tells us about the temperature in clouds when the snow fell, and thus of the climate of the past. The air bubbles in the ice are also examined.
What does the Vostok ice core reveal?
Snow accumulates very slowly there, and an ice core contains a long, accurate record of the temperature at Vostok, and of the atmospheric composition, because air bubbles trapped in the ice are little samples of the old atmosphere.
How far back does the Greenland ice core data go back?
The oldest continuous ice core records to date extend 123,000 years in Greenland and 800,000 years in Antarctica. Ice cores contain information about past temperature, and about many other aspects of the environment.
How do you date ice cores?
Ice cores can be dated using counting of annual layers in their uppermost layers. Dating the ice becomes harder with depth. Other ways of dating ice cores include geochemisty, wiggle matching of ice core records to insolation time series (Lemieux-Dudon et al.
How do ice cores prove global warming?
By looking at past concentrations of greenhouse gasses in layers in ice cores, scientists can calculate how modern amounts of carbon dioxide and methane compare to those of the past, and, essentially, compare past concentrations of greenhouse gasses to temperature. Ice coring has been around since the 1950s.
What does ice core data tell us?
Ice cores can tell scientists about temperature, precipitation, atmospheric composition, volcanic activity, and even wind patterns. Scientists tie all of these different threads of information provided by the ice cores together and weave them into a single continuous picture of the Earth’s past climate.
What is the Vostok ice core and why is it important for us to look at it?
Ice core samples taken at the Vostok station are used to collect data on historical carbon dioxide levels. The data consist of measurements of the percentage of atmospheric gasses, such as CO2 in fossil air bubbles that have been trapped in snow flakes and compressed into ice over 400,000 years old.
Why is the Vostok ice core important?
Ice cores provide uninterrupted information on important properties of paleoclimate, including local temperature and precipitation rate, humidity, and wind speed as well as changes in atmospheric composition.
Where is the oldest ice on Earth?
Antarctica
The oldest ice on Earth probably is hiding somewhere in Antarctica, because this frozen continent holds ice that’s hundreds of thousands and even millions of years old.
How reliable are ice cores?
Ice cores are remarkably faithful recorders of past climate, providing multiply duplicated reconstructions with small and quantifiable uncertainties.
How old are Greenland ice cores?
The deepest ice core records come from Antarctica and Greenland, where the very deepest ice cores extend to 3 kilometers (over two miles) in depth. The oldest continuous ice core records extend to 130,000 years in Greenland, and 800,000 years in Antarctica.
How can you tell how old an ice core is?
Determining the age of the ice in an ice core can be done in a number of ways. Counting layers, chemical analysis and mathematical models are all used. Annual layers of snowfall recorded in an ice core can be counted — in much the same way that tree-rings can be counted — to determine the age of the ice.