The history of Earth’s climate is written within ice. Drilling vertically into ice and extracting a core is akin to measuring how old a tree is by counting a stump’s rings. But ice contains more information than just age.
Scientists can deduce a particle time period's temperature. They can also measure trapped gases like CO2 and methane to see how they may have contributed to warming periods.
Scientists have now retrieved the longest such documentation — an ice core nearly 2 miles long that captures about 1.2 million years of climate information. This record can help us better understand Earth’s climate changes over time — and may provide hints of what’s to come.
