Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock(news.ku.dk)
news.ku.dk
Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock
https://news.ku.dk/all_news/2023/07/pay-dirt-for-ice-core-scientists-in-east-greenland-as-they-reach-bedrock/
335 comments
Interesting: "Towards the base, the ice is more than 120,000 years old and dates back to the last interglacial period, a time when the atmospheric temperature above Greenland was 5°C warmer than today."
Can't believe they don't show a photo of what appears to be a 10 meter in diameter, 2.7km deep hole.
If drilling big holes for scientific research is your thing, I suggest https://usoceandiscovery.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Casc... as an interesting read about earthquakes and tsunamis.
A quick summary:
A quick summary:
> Geophysical and hydrological observatories in sealed boreholes provide a powerful tool to understand the hydrology of crustal formations, a means measure the hydrologic signal from changes in volumetric strain, and a stable site for high quality seismic and geodetic instrumentation.
That's a rate of about 4.3 centimeters per hour.
Can anybody elaborate as to why this process takes so long?
Can anybody elaborate as to why this process takes so long?
At approximately the same depth drilled, Antarctica e.g. EPICA @ Dome C yields 8 interglacials [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Project_for_Ice_Corin...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Project_for_Ice_Corin...
There is a design for an ice-melting-slurry-bot that could be made, where the outer diameter of the bore is melted by heat/lasers - where the lasers/heat is also projected into a cone at the point of the bore-ing machine, where the center pipe is a vacuum to slurp up the slurry as it melts the ice around the bore-head...
Would it theoreticaly possible to find frozen animals 120.000 years old with still intact DNA?
I love humans.
They somehow decided to start drilling, and not give up & get funding for 7 years.
We are a crazy but exciting bunch of organisms.
They somehow decided to start drilling, and not give up & get funding for 7 years.
We are a crazy but exciting bunch of organisms.
They can use this method to break the bedrock and reach the void - https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Tutorials/Breaking_bedrock...
It is important to note that you need to be very careful near the void, as it is very hard to escape, and 64 blocks down you get instant damage which would get you killed.
It is important to note that you need to be very careful near the void, as it is very hard to escape, and 64 blocks down you get instant damage which would get you killed.
what is the risk of uncovering ancient viruses and bacteria from permafrost that we don't have immunity to
>electromechanical drill designed to take 122 mm (4.8-inch) diameter ice cores
Interesting that they choose 122mm as the core size when designing the drill. It makes me wonder if its built from a decommissioned and repurposed 122mm artillery gun barrel.
Interesting that they choose 122mm as the core size when designing the drill. It makes me wonder if its built from a decommissioned and repurposed 122mm artillery gun barrel.
Two numbers from the article: The oldest ice is 120000 years old. The ice is moving at 58 m/years.
If these numbers are correct the oldest ice has travelled almost 7000 km. Greenland isn't that large, and it did not shrink. The age estimate is probably correct.
The speed must have been a lot lower in the past?
If these numbers are correct the oldest ice has travelled almost 7000 km. Greenland isn't that large, and it did not shrink. The age estimate is probably correct.
The speed must have been a lot lower in the past?
I have a hard time trusting climate data from before we had satellites or other forms of precise automated recording. If climate scientists are telling us they _know_ detailed information about global atmospheric temperatures, greenhouse gas concentrations, etc. over millions years because they cored some ice from a select set of places on earth, I just don't know how an average person is supposed to believe that. It appears to the layman to be data generation on par with an episode of CSI where the lab somehow 'enhances' low res photos to high res.
Where are the million year long experiments demonstrating how ice and its contents changes over such long time spans, that vast majority of which we were not even conscious for as a species? It is too many variable to fit into any sort of computing technology today, and the science is mostly based on statistics which everyone knows can be twisted easily.
Where are the million year long experiments demonstrating how ice and its contents changes over such long time spans, that vast majority of which we were not even conscious for as a species? It is too many variable to fit into any sort of computing technology today, and the science is mostly based on statistics which everyone knows can be twisted easily.
so how do they know its not just a big rock covered in frozen mud with more ice below it
From the picture that looks like a pretty large hole... any chance that execrates the melting process by increasing the surface area? Or is it insignificant just curious if someone has thought about or done any calculations...
I’ve always wondered: what do they do if the shaft snaps somewhere in the middle?
> The researchers literally got mud from under the ice cap on their feet.
stop the presses!
why is this article written this way? a mixture of factual science and juvenile exuberance.
stop the presses!
why is this article written this way? a mixture of factual science and juvenile exuberance.
Finally, a new ice product for cocktail enthusiasts to fetishize.
Isn't this the basically the plot to the prequel of The Thing?
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Have a drink?
Please, if the title is going to be that, at least remove the capitalization from that "m", so it represents an unity instead of "millions of something undisclosed".
At the mountains of madness
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One of the big unknowns in the model is "where will the clouds show up?" That unknown stems from our understanding of the water capacity of air by temperature, the increase in air temperature leads to the air holding more water, and water is the basis for cloud formation. If the clouds form "low" they increase albedo and create colder temperatures, if they form "high" they act as a semi-mirrored surface and reflect light that has been reflected from the surface back down for another shot at generating heat.
Much of the IPCC's work has been done in MATLAB[1,2] so if you have a reasonably powerful workstation you can play around with various initial conditions and settings yourself to see what might happen in the future.
No matter what the far future holds, the near future holds more violent storms as storms are powered by the temperature differentials of the air, land, and sea.
It is of note (for me, probably not for many others) that we don't have good models for how an ice age starts. There are a few papers that talk about ice ages being a response to warming (hit a tipping point, generate clouds, and get a "nuclear winter" scenario without the nuclear part). But much of the nuclear winter work has been refined and that scenario is generally considered unlikely AFAICT from what people seem to be publishing these days. Turco's work[3] and things that cite it are a good jumping off point if you want to read up on that. It isn't perfect because smoke/soot are not clouds (different albedo numbers, different cooling attributes) but the accumulation and dispersion of atmospheric obstructions is solid stuff.
[1] Some code and information used to generate plots in the IPCC reports -- https://github.com/IPCC-WG1/Chapter-9
[2] Mathworks trying to get you to buy their climate data toolbox -- https://www.mathworks.com/discovery/climate-stress-testing.h...
[3] Climate and Smoke: an Appraisal of Nuclear Winter -- https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.11538069