U of M scientist hopes ancient Antarctica ice sample offers cool climate clues

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This article was published 09/01/2025 (633 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A team of international scientists, including a University of Manitoba academic, has retrieved the world’s longest ice sample in an effort to learn about Earth’s climate hundreds of thousands of years ago.

Just after Christmas from a remote site in Antarctica, the team drilled thousands of metres to reach where the ice sheet meets bedrock. The ice sample contains greenhouse gas bubbles that hold clues to climate and atmospheric history dating back more than 800,000 years.

The ice core shows a continuous record of the Earth’s climate as far back as 1.2 million years.

Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, chair of the ice core science consortium at the U of M, was part of the team to drill the 2,800-metre sample.

“We’re pretty excited about it and can’t wait to get working on (researching) it,” she said from Denmark Thursday.

The project was 10 years in the making, Dahl-Jensen said.

The team began using radars in 2014 to identify the spots likely to contain the old ice. Drilling began in 2019.

Over a period of four seasons (the team did not drill during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic), a special drill designed in Europe went through the ice sheet metre by metre to reach the bedrock.

Dahl-Jensen, her team and a broader group of scientists will soon begin extracting greenhouse gases trapped in bubbles within the ice sample, which consists of one-metre blocks that will be transported to Denmark from Antarctica in insulated foam containers.

By studying the ice and gases, researchers hope to learn about the past to help the future.

“Right now we are warming the climate because we are increasing the concentrations of greenhouse gases, and in that way we are going exactly into a climate situation that reminds very much about the climate about 1.2 million years ago,” she said. “So by looking back in time, we get a snapshot on the climate situation that might be valuable for us in understanding what’s going on right now.”

The project was coordinated by the Institute of Polar Sciences of the National Research Council of Italy and funded by the European Commission with support from national partners across Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom.

In Spring, Dahl-Jensen and a different team will undertake a similar project in Nunavut, drilling thousands of metres below the ice to retrieve cores in order to learn about what Canada’s climate once was. The analysis will eventually take place at the University of Alberta.

nicole.buffie@freepress.mb.ca