Latest Ice core Stories

The end of the Norse colonies on Greenland have long been shrouded in mystery, and while archaeologists have been able to fill in some blanks, there is limited written evidence of the colony's demise in the 14th and early 15th century. But now, new research from Brown University suggests that Greenland's early Viking settlers lived in a region with a rapidly changing climate with temperatures plunging several degrees on average in a span of decades. Climate scientists have been able to...

Cooling trend could be on the way unless thwarted by greenhouse gassesThere's an old saying that if you don't like the weather in New Mexico, wait five minutes. Maybe it should be amended to 10,000 years, according to new research.In a letter published recently in the journal Nature, Los Alamos National Laboratory researchers and an international team of scientists report that the Southwest region of the United States undergoes "megadroughts""”warmer, more arid periods lasting...

Scientists took samples in New Jersey for latest researchTwenty thousand years of massive volcanic eruptions doubled the level of carbon dioxide (CO2) in Earth's atmosphere 200 million years ago, according to research by Rutgers geologists published recently in the journal Science.Morgan Schaller, Jim Wright and Dennis Kent report that the level of atmospheric CO2 went from about 2,000 parts per million to 4,000 parts per million and then shrank back to pre-eruption levels over the next...

Research project completes drilling for the year, reaching two miles below West Antarctic Ice SheetOn Friday, Jan. 28 in Antarctica, a research team investigating the last 100,000 years of Earth's climate history reached an important milestone completing the main ice core to a depth of 3,331 meters (10,928 feet) at West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide (WAIS). The project will be completed over the next two years with some additional coring and borehole logging to obtain additional information and...

Scientists studying the world's most enigmatic lake have only 165 feet left to drill as time is running out. Vostok is a sub-glacial lake in Antarctica, hidden about 13,000 ft beneath the ice sheet. With the Antarctic summer almost over, temperatures will soon start to drop. Scientists will leave the remote base on February 6, when conditions are still mild enough for a plane to land. The team has not stopped drilling for weeks. "It's like working on an alien planet where no one has been...

Raimund Muscheler is a researcher at the Department of Earth and Ecosystem Sciences at Lund University in Sweden. In the latest issue of the journal Science, he and his colleagues have described how the surface water temperature in the tropical parts of the eastern Pacific varied with the sun's activity between 7 000 and 11 000 years ago (early Holocene). Contrary to what one might intuitively believe, high solar activity had a cooling effect in this region."It is perhaps a similar...

Carbon monoxide trapped in ice cores reveals unexpected trends regarding burning biomassScientists studying a column of Antarctic ice spanning 650 years have found evidence for fluctuations in biomass burning--the consumption of wood, peat and other materials in wildfires, cooking fires and communal fires--in the Southern Hemisphere.The record, focused primarily on carbon monoxide (CO), differs substantially from the record in the Northern Hemisphere, suggesting changes may be necessary for...

Glaciologists who drilled through an ice cap perched precariously on the edge of a 16,000-foot-high Indonesian mountain ridge say that the ice field could vanish within in the next few years, another victim of global climate change.The Ohio State University researchers, supported by a National Science Foundation grant and the Freeport-McMoRan mining company and collaborating with Meteorological, Climatological and Geophysical Agency (BMKG) Indonesia and Columbia University, drilled three ice...

International team of climate researchers drill through a mile and half of the Greenland ice sheet in search of climate change insightsAfter years of concentrated effort, scientists from the North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling (NEEM) project hit bedrock more than 8,300 feet below the surface of the Greenland ice sheet last week. The project has yielded ice core samples that may offer valuable insights into how the world can change during periods of abrupt warming.Led by Denmark and the United...

An international science team involving the University of Colorado at Boulder that is working on the North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling project hit bedrock July 27 after two summers of work, drilling down more than 1.5 miles in an effort to help assess the risks of abrupt future climate change on Earth.Led by Denmark and the United States, the team recovered ice from the Eemian interglacial period from about 115,000 to 130,000 years ago, a time when temperatures were 3.6 to 5.4 degrees...