What is an example of ice core?

What is an example of ice core?

An ice core is a core sample that is typically removed from an ice sheet or a high mountain glacier. Greenland ice cores contain layers of wind-blown dust that correlate with cold, dry periods in the past, when cold deserts were scoured by wind.

What are ice cores for kids?

An ice core is a long piece of ice taken from a glacier. The ice is drilled very deep, so that the ice core goes back to old ice at the bottom of the glacier. Usually, ice cores are taken from Antarctica, Greenland or very high mountains. Snow falls on ground and accumulates (gets deeper).

What ice cores tell us?

Ice cores can tell scientists about temperature, precipitation, atmospheric composition, volcanic activity, and even wind patterns. The thickness of each layer allows scientists to determine how much snow fell in the area during a particular year.

What are ice cores how are they used?

Ice cores are the time machines that allow us to investigate past climate. They preserve actual bubbles of air that mean that we can look at past concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

What is an ice core and what is it used for?

Ice core records can be used to reconstruct temperature, atmospheric circulation strength, precipitation, ocean volume, atmospheric dust, volcanic eruptions, solar variability, marine biological productivity, sea ice and desert extent, and forest fires. The GISP2 ice core in Greenland was drilled as deep as 2 miles.

How do you read an ice core?

Carbon dioxide measurements from older ice in Greenland is less reliable, as meltwater layers have elevated carbon dioxide (CO2 is highly soluble in water). Older records of carbon dioxide are therefore best taken from Antarctic ice cores. Other complexities in ice core science include thermal diffusion.

How reliable are ice cores?

Ice cores are remarkably faithful recorders of past climate, providing multiply duplicated reconstructions with small and quantifiable uncertainties.

How do they 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.

What are ice cores geography?

ice core, long cylinder of glacial ice recovered by drilling through glaciers in Greenland, Antarctica, and high mountains around the world. Scientists retrieve these cores to look for records of climate change over the last 100,000 years or more.

How do you date ice cores?

What do ice cores tell us about the past?

Each layer gives scientists a treasure trove of information about the climate each year. Like marine sediment cores, an ice core provides a vertical timeline of past climates stored in ice sheets and mountain glaciers. Ice sheets contain a record of hundreds of thousands of years of past climate, trapped in the ancient snow.

When did scientists start to drill ice cores?

To pry climate clues out of the ice, scientists began to drill long cores out of the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica in the late 1960s.

Where does the NSF get its ice cores from?

—Credit: Peter Rejcek, NSF Ice cores are drilled in glaciers and on ice sheets on all of Earth’s continents. Most ice cores, however, come from Antarctica and Greenland, where the longest ice cores extend to 3 kilometers—over 2 miles—or more in depth.

How old is the oldest record of an ice core?

By the time Alley and the GISP2 project finished in the early 1990s, they had pulled a nearly 2-mile-long core (3,053.44 meters) from the Greenland ice sheet, providing a record of at least the past 110,000 years. Even older records going back about 750,000 years have come out of Antarctica.