A million-year-old ice sample drilled
from 3 kilometres under the Antarctic and unveiled in Tokyo on
Tuesday could yield vital clues on climate change, Japanese
scientists said.

Researchers, showing off the cylindrical samples of what
they said was the oldest ice ever to be retrieved, said
studying air trapped inside "core" samples taken from various
depths under ground could also help predict how the Earth’s
weather patterns will change in the future.

"The ice core is made up of snow that fell in the distant
past," said project leader Hideaki Motoyama of the National
Institute of Polar Research, dressed snugly in a parka after
unveiling the gleaming ice in a room kept at minus 20 degrees
Celsius (minus 4 Fahrenheit).

"You can use it to examine changes in temperature, levels
of carbon dioxide and methane over time, information that is
only available from the core," he said.

Researchers at the Dome Fuji base in the eastern Antarctic
spent more than two years on the delicate operation of drilling
into the ice sheet, coming up with the million-year-old samples
in January and shipping them to Japan on an icebreaker.

Research based on a previous study of Antarctic ice and
published by Nature magazine last year said concentrations of
carbon dioxide and methane were far higher now than at any time
in the last 650,000 years.

The Japanese team will look farther into the past and are
also hoping the ice samples will yield opportunities to study
the evolution of tiny organisms trapped in the ice.

"The environment there is very harsh, with temperatures
about minus 45 degrees, so we don’t know if life can be
sustained," Motoyama said. "But we believe we will find
organisms."

The researchers believe they can dig about another 20
metres into the ice at the Antarctic site before reaching base
rock.

Reuters.com