Extraordinary Antarctic Ice Core Will Help Scientists Study Global Warming

The remarkable new core was extracted during the recent Antarctic summer from record-setting drilling depths 4,214 feet below the sea floor beneath Antarctica’s Ross Ice Shelf, the Earth’s largest floating ice body. Laced with sediment dating from the present day to about 10 million years ago, the core provides a geologic record of the ice shelf’s history in unprecedented detail.



Greenish rock layered throughout the “time capsule” indicates periods of open-water conditions, suggesting that the Ross ice shelf retreated and advanced perhaps as many as 50 times over the last 5 million years in response to climate changes, says FSU AMGRF Head Curator Matthew Olney. He notes that signs of fluctuations such as these are critical because the Ross Sea ice is a floating extension of the even bigger West Antarctic Ice Sheet — an area of the southernmost continent so unstable that scientists foresee its collapse in a world overheated by global warming. A collapse there could raise sea levels worldwide by a catastrophic 20 feet.

Science Daily