Scientists Set Off On A Journey To Find The Oldest Ice on Earth; Know How This Will Help Fight Climate Change

A group of scientists from Europe is heading to Antarctica this month in the hope that they will be find the oldest ice on Earth. The team, part of a European Union-funded research consortium from 10 countries, will initially search for a suitable site to drill an ice core. The ultimate objective of this ambitious mission is to find out how the Earth's climate has changed over the past 1.5 million years.

According to British Antarctic Survey, dubbed as Beyond EPICA-Oldest Ice (BE-OI), the project will see the researchers extract air from tiny bubbles trapped in the ice that, in turn, will help them better understand the changes in the Earth's atmospheric conditions over time.

"In the early 2000s we drilled an ice core from Antarctica that gave us a climate record going back 800,000 years. Now we want to double the length of that record to investigate an important shift in Earth's climate around one million years ago, when the planet's climate cycle between cold glacial conditions and warmer interludes changed from being dominated by a 41,000-year pattern to a 100,000 year cycle," said Dr. Robert Mulvaney, ice core scientist from British Antarctic Survey (BAS), the U.K. partner in Beyond EPICA.

Climate scientists believe that there have been at least five major ice ages since the formation of the Earth some 4.5 billion years ago. The most recent of which occurred during the Pleistocene Epoch that began roughly 1.8 million years ago and lasted till 11,700 years ago, Live Science reports.

While the details regarding the exact causes leading to these periodic ice ages are somewhat sketchy, many scientists are of the view that this happens mainly because a combination of multiple factors that include the Earth's distance from the Sun, atmospheric composition, as well as ocean circulations.

Dr. Mulvaney also stated that a better understanding of the phenomenon that controlled the shift in Earth's ice ages in the past will help scientists decode how ice will behave in the ongoing state of global warming due to human-induced climate change.