The ice survey project is being carried out as part of a comprehensive study of Lake Vostok and Earth’s paleoclimate together with scientists from the Saint Petersburg Mining University. This particular ice will now be shipped to St. Petersburg and studied at the AARI laboratories.
As Alexander Makarov, director of AARI, explained, what interests scientists most is million-year-old ice. And it’s not about the magic of numbers. Presumably, during this period in the planet’s atmosphere there could be an increased concentration of carbon dioxide and the restructuring of the climate system.
Having received data on climate change in that distant era, it will be possible to formulate hypotheses about the causes and rates of the changes that occurred, as well as how nature survived the sharp increase in carbon dioxide levels.
“The global climate transformations of the past were much more severe than the ones we are experiencing, and they were caused by natural causes,” Makarov stressed.
Now the planet is also experiencing climate change, but at a much higher rate than hundreds of thousands of years ago.
By the way, we are lucky: we live in a relatively warm interglacial period. But this will not always be so. The interglacial will be followed by the glacial. True, it will not be so soon: the approximate duration of the periods is 100 thousand years.
And last year, scientists extracted ancient ice over 500,000 years old.
