Posted on 21 April 2021 by Doug Bostrom

Near doubling of age of oldest coherent ice core on tap?

Studies of paleoclimate  help us to understand our own recent creation of accidental rapid climate change and what we may expect from our blunder. Among many other sources of paleoclimate data, ice cores stand out for their near "tape recorder" fidelity in recording various features of climate of the past and - even better - some direct information about what may have been shaping climate at any given time during ice core coverage.

The very oldest ice recovered from "deep storage" in Antarctica  (and anywhere) so far dates back about 2.7 million years. There is certainly useful information to be had from these samples but as a tape recording goes they're the equivalent of a reel that has been sliced into segments of instants of time then scrambled, with most segments gone missing. That's because their preservation was the result of happenstance as ice passing over particular forms of topography encountered "turbulence," with some  fragments of very old layers pushed higher toward the surface so that even while parent layers were subsequently lost, these scattered parts remained available. Beyond this fluky preservation mechanism leaving a lot of gaps, it's a non-trivial job to identify the age of such chunks and unscramble their place in chronology.

The oldest coherent and most-like-a-tape-recording ice core we have in hand spans a bit more than 800,000 years into the past. This is an impressive achievement and has proven valuable for our understanding of climate behavior and drivers over "deep time." But of course it leaves us hungry for more, according with our species' insatiable curiosity.

Now a substantial team of researchers led by David Lilien have published a paper that may well mark exactly "X" on the map of where to drill in order to nearly double our coherent ice core record. Yet again the spot lies in Antarctica. Using newly available radar equipment and an abundance of brain power, the group have identified and characterized an apparently intact sequence of ice layers extending to 1.5 million years ago. This is an important, significant discovery. These results suggest it won't be long before we see cores hauled up; the prospects and demand for new data are compelling to "drill, baby, drill." When those cores emerge, our insight into climate behavior will be projected backward to nearly double what we could before see.

New radar constraints support presence of ice older than 1.5 Myr at Little Dome C is open access and free to read. The abstract:

The area near Dome C, East Antarctica, is thought to be one of the most promising targets for recovering a continuous ice-core record spanning more than a million years. The European Beyond EPICA consortium has selected Little Dome C (LDC), an area ∼ 35 km southeast of Concordia Station, to attempt to recover such a record. Here, we present the results of the final ice-penetrating radar survey used to refine the exact drill site. These data were acquired during the 2019–2020 austral summer using a new, multi-channel high-resolution very high frequency (VHF) radar operating in the frequency range of 170–230 MHz. This new instrument is able to detect reflectors in the near-basal region, where previous surveys were largely unable to detect horizons. The radar stratigraphy is used to transfer the timescale of the EPICA Dome C ice core (EDC) to the area of Little Dome C, using radar isochrones dating back past 600 ka. We use these data to derive the expected depth–age relationship through the ice column at the now-chosen drill site, termed BELDC (Beyond EPICA LDC). These new data indicate that the ice at BELDC is considerably older than that at EDC at the same depth and that there is about 375 m of ice older than 600 kyr at BELDC. Stratigraphy is well preserved to 2565 m, ∼ 93 % of the ice thickness, below which there is a basal unit with unknown properties. An ice-flow model tuned to the isochrones suggests ages likely reach 1.5 Myr near 2500 m, ∼ 65 m above the basal unit and ∼ 265 m above the bed, with sufficient resolution (19 ± 2 kyr m−1) to resolve 41 kyr glacial cycles.

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