A group of scientists partnered with various foundations in the U.S. has effectively pulled an ice center from Antarctica’s Ong Valley that contains tests of Earth’s atmosphere from up to a long time back. In their paper distributed in The Cryosphere, the analysts make sense of why they decided to bore in the Ong Valley and what they hoped to gain from their investigation of the ice center.
Researchers have been boring and pulling ice centers in Antarctica for a long time—the thought is to concentrate on the air bubbles that have been caught in the ice, some of which return after a long period of time, to study the Earth’s air in those days. As of recently, most such core examples have been pulled from locales in eastern pieces of Antarctica on the grounds that the ice there has been kept gradually in clean layers for millions of years.
The analysts decided to bore in the Ong Valley, which is located in the Transantarctic Mountains, which, as the name implies, separate eastern and western Antarctica. Ice in the Ong valley was kept there by icy masses that slid down from the mountains. As the ice on top softened, rocks pulled down from the mountains formed a layer of rock that safeguards the ice underneath it. Also, earlier examination has proposed that the ice under could be from as far back as a long time ago. As well as being more seasoned than the ice in the east, the ice in the Ong Valley is likewise less thick, and that implies getting a helpful center doesn’t need to be as profound.
The scientists bored through the ice over the summers of 2017 and 2018, and had the option to get to the safeguarded ice underneath the stone and to pull a center example 9.5 meters long. Starting testing of the isotopes it contained proposes that the age of the ice goes from 3 million to a little more than 5 million years. For example, neon, aluminum, and beryllium can be utilized for age testing since they were made by vast beams slamming into the stones above. The analysts likewise found that the ice sheet beneath the stones really contains two sheets, one over the other, suggesting two icy masses ended up at that site in the valley, a long period of time separated.
More information: Marie Bergelin et al, Cosmogenic nuclide dating of two stacked ice masses: Ong Valley, Antarctica, The Cryosphere (2022). DOI: 10.5194/tc-16-2793-2022
Journal information: The Cryosphere
