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 An international team traveled to Antarctica's Aurora Basin in a
five-week project that began last December, to drill for ice samples
needed to bridge a gap in knowledge of temperature changes over the
last 20 centuries.
Using the latest technology to probe the secrets of the past, the
scientists hope to gain information to improve climate models and
give a sense of normal frequency and patterns now seen in extreme
events such as droughts, cyclones and floods.
"The papers that will result from this project can inform and
improve our climate models to improve our knowledge of what climate
has done in the recent past," said Nick Gales, chief scientist of
the Australian Antarctic Division in Tasmania.
"That will greatly assist our ability to project climate change," he
told Reuters on Thursday.The main ice core retrieved by the
scientists, which is 303 meters (994 feet) long, will provide annual
climate records for the past 2,000 years.
Two smaller cores, of 116 m. (381 feet) and 103 m (338 feet)in
length, spanning the past 800 to 1,000 years, will provide extra ice
for large-volume analyses of chemicals."Just to go out there and
successfully drill down several hundred meters of Antarctic ice core
within a season and bring it all back is a really major achievement
in itself," Gales said.
Two tonnes of ice core sections have now been distributed to ice
core laboratories around the world for analysis.
"This kind of thing is really big science," Gales added. "It
requires a lot of collaboration to get a whole lot of people and a
whole lot of equipment hundreds of kilometers inland on the
Antarctic continent."
Scientists will perform measurements over the next year and begin
publication of results over the next 18 to 24 months, Gales said.
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"They’ll continue for quite a few years and then each of those
papers will provide another key piece of the jigsaw in the big
picture," he said.
The long time-series data from the ice cores, combined with other
information, will improve understanding of extreme events, Gales
said, by revealing how humans have influenced climate change through
the burning of fossil fuels.
The Aurora Basin project involves 15 partner organizations from six
nations: Australia, China, Denmark, France, Germany and the United
States.
The effort paves the way for a more ambitious drilling expedition to
collect a one-million-year-old ice core in the future, the project's
lead scientist, Mark Curran, said in a statement.
(Reporting by Pauline Askin; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)
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