COLUMBUS – Researchers at Ohio State hope a 1,000-foot long chunk of ice that’s more than a half-million years old will yield clues to the Earth’s climate history.
The oldest ice core ever drilled outside the polar regions may contain ice that formed during the Stone Age more than 600,000 years ago, long before modern humans appeared, says Lonnie Thompson (shown above in 2015), Distinguished University Professor in the School of Earth Sciences at OSU and co-leader of a team of researchers from the U.S. and China who traveled to the Guliya Ice Cap in Tibet’s Kunlun Mountains.
That’s where they retrieved the core, which is nearly as long as the Empire State Building is tall, and which the researchers hope to use to assemble one of the longest-ever records of Earth’s climate history.
They have already observed that, over the last few centuries, a rapid temperature in the region, where the average temperature has risen 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit in the last 50 years and the average precipitation has risen by 2.1 inches per year over the past 25 years, said Thompson.
“The ice cores actually demonstrate that warming is happening, and is already having detrimental effects on Earth’s freshwater ice stores,” he said.
Cores are composed of compressed layers of snow and ice that contain chemicals from the air and precipitation during wet and dry seasons which can be used to measure historical changes in climate.
Earth’s largest supply of freshwater ice outside of the Arctic and Antarctica resides in Tibet, a place that was off limits to American glaciologists until 20 years ago, when Ohio State’s Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center began a collaboration with China’s Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research.