The European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica (EPICA) is a multinational European project for deep ice core drilling in Antarctica. Its main objective is to obtain full documentation of the climatic and atmospheric record archived in Antarctic ice by drilling and analyzing two ice cores and comparing these with their Greenland counterparts (GRIP and GISP). Evaluation of these records will provide information about the natural climate variability and mechanisms of rapid climatic changes during the last glacial epoch.
The European Science Foundation EPICA Programme (1996–2005) provides co-ordination for EPICA drilling activities at Dome Concordia and Kohnen Station, which are supported by the European Commission and by national contributions from Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
Deep drilling took place at two sites in Antarctica: Concordia Station at Dome C and Kohnen Station.
In 2008 the project received the Descartes Prize for Research.[1]
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Climate change: understanding the facts (Vostok ice core)
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Lakes Beneath Antarctic Ice: Deep Dark and Mysterious
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ARTICO. ULTIMA FRONTIERA - Carlo Barbante
Transcription
Hi Alex here. Is climate change really human-made? There's been a lot of research and reports published over the years and I don't blame you if you don't want to read it all so here is what we know for sure in 3 minutes. Let's get drawing! It all started in 1998 when an ice-drilling project was undertaken in the Russian Vostok Station in Antarctica. The project yielded the deepest ice-core ever recovered giving access to ice that was 420,000 years old at a depth of 3,623 meters. It supplied data about atmospheric composition and climate through 4 climate cycles. So here is how it all works: the formation of the glaciers results from the transformation of water into ice during this process which can last thousands of years sediments air and rocks are stuck into the ice making millions of layers one above the other in chronological order. Over the time, the glacier becomes a million page history book with the last chapter on the top. The deeper you drill the older the compounds are. The ice core gave access to climate data including local temperature, precipitation rate, wind strength, etc. but also and this is what we are interested in here the ice core provided direct records of past changes in atmospheric trace-gas composition thanks to their entrapped air inclusions. Then it was possible to determine the levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) at a given time so here is what global temperature and atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane look like over for climate cycles 420,000 years So you can clearly see the four climate cycles and you also see that they have very similar spikes and patterns there is clearly a relationship between temperature carbon dioxide and methane. The upper and lower boundaries up the three variables are tightly constrained which is typical a self-regulating system. Our body is also a self-regulating system and does something similar in a way: when you exercise your body sweats as a way to regulate its temperature well on Earth when concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane go up global temperature goes up too. Now here is what happened with the concentration of atmospheric CO2 since 1960: it increased by about 70 parts per million that is more than one part per million each year indicating significant human perturbation in the self-regulating of Earth since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution As this concentration is now way over the upper boundary noted during the last 420,000 years and as the Earth seems to be a self-regulating system well we can expect the global temperature to increase as well and we are already seeing this worlwide. Since the Vostok research was published more recent ice cores were performed by the European Project for Ice Coring in Antractica (the EPICA) they provided data for the last 800,000 years and confirmed the findings in Vostok so as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change simply puts it in their 2013 report: "human influence on the climate system is clear" and we can safely say that we human beings are responsible for climate change So please subscribe to learn more about sustainability through short animation videos and thank you for watching
Concordia Station at Dome C
This site (75°06′S 123°21′E / 75.100°S 123.350°E, 3233 m above sea level, 560 km from Vostok Station) was chosen to obtain the longest undisturbed chronicle of environmental change, in order to characterise climate variability over several glacial cycles, and to study potential climate forcings and their relationship to events in other regions. The core goes back 740,000 years and reveals 8 previous glacial cycles. Drilling was completed at this site in December 2004, reaching a drilling depth of 3270.2 m, 5 m above bedrock. Present-day annual average air temperature is −54.5 °C and snow accumulation 25 mm/y. Information about the core was first published in Nature on 10 June 2004.[2]
The picture shows delta deuterium data (a proxy for temperature: more negative values indicate lower temperatures) from both EPICA and Vostok. The upper plot, with x-axis being age (years before 1950) clearly shows the extra information in the EPICA core before the start of the Vostok record. The lower picture, plotted against depth, shows how compressed the deeper parts of the cores are: the earliest 100 kyr (thousand years) of the EPICA core are in the bottom 100 m of the core.
Before 400 kyr the character of the ice ages are seen to be somewhat different: interglacial warmth is distinctly less warm than the four most recent interglacials; however, the interglacial periods before 400 kyr occupied a much larger proportion of each cycle than subsequently. The interglacial 400 kyr ago, which is believed (from arguments about the configuration of the orbital parameters of the earth) to be an approximate analogue to the current interglacial, was quite long: 28 kyr. The Nature paper argues that if this analogue is accepted, then the current climate would be expected to continue like today's, in the absence of human influence (which it states is unlikely, given the predicted increases in greenhouse gas concentrations).
Further analysis of the core is hoped to extend the record back somewhat further, possibly as far as the Brunhes–Matuyama magnetic reversal, believed to be at about 780 kyr.
The core time scale is derived from the measured depth scale by a model incorporating surface snow accumulation variations, ice thinning, basal heat fluxes, etc., and is empirically "tied" at 4 times by matches to the marine isotopic record.
Kohnen Station, Dronning Maud Land
Kohnen Station is located at 75°00′S 00°04′E / 75.000°S 0.067°E, 2892 m above sea level. Higher annual snowfall and sensitivity to conditions over the South Atlantic will allow the study of any links between shifts in the Atlantic Ocean circulation and the rapid climate events detected over Greenland.
Beyond EPICA – Oldest Ice
The European project "Beyond EPICA – Oldest Ice"[3] aims at obtaining older ice cores, which are expected to provide climatic data up to 1.5 million years old. A drill site, "Little Dome C", was chosen in 2022 and drilling operations will take place in the following years.[4]
See also
References
- ^ ESF’s European ice core project EPICA receives prestigious Descartes Prize for Collaborative, Transnational Research Archived 2011-09-27 at the Wayback Machine ESF press release, 12 March 2008
- ^ Augustin L, Barbante C, Barnes PR, et al. (June 2004). "Eight glacial cycles from an Antarctic ice core" (PDF). Nature. 429 (6992): 623–8. Bibcode:2004Natur.429..623A. doi:10.1038/nature02599. PMID 15190344.
- ^ "Home". beyondepica.eu.
- ^ "Successful first stage in search for oldest ice".
External links
- EPICA page of the European Science Foundation
- White JW (June 2004). "Paleoclimate. Do I hear a million?". Science. 304 (5677): 1609–10. doi:10.1126/science.1100084. PMID 15192208. S2CID 129188583. as PDF
- Kohnen Station home page
- EPICA Press Release announcing the successful completion of ice core drilling at Dome C
- Coverage by the BBC
- COMNAP Antarctic Facilities
- COMNAP Antarctic Facilities Map
This page was last edited on 24 January 2024, at 14:44