How far back does ice core data go?

800,000 years
They allow us to go back in time and to sample accumulation, air temperature and air chemistry from another time[1]. Ice core records allow us to generate continuous reconstructions of past climate, going back at least 800,000 years[2].

What are ice core records?

Ice cores are cylinders of ice drilled out of an ice sheet or glacier. Most ice core records come from Antarctica and Greenland, and the longest ice cores extend to 3km in depth. Ice cores contain information about past temperature, and about many other aspects of the environment.

What did the Epica ice core reveal?

The Antarctic Vostok ice core provided compelling evidence of the nature of climate, and of climate feedbacks, over the past 420,000 years. Marine records suggest that the amplitude of climate variability was smaller before that time, but such records are often poorly resolved.

How do you date ice cores?

Ice cores can be dated using counting of annual layers in their uppermost layers. Dating the ice becomes harder with depth. Other ways of dating ice cores include geochemisty, wiggle matching of ice core records to insolation time series (Lemieux-Dudon et al.

How old is the oldest glacier?

How old is glacier ice?

• The age of the oldest glacier ice in Antarctica may approach 1,000,000 years old.
• The age of the oldest glacier ice in Greenland is more than 100,000 years old.
• The age of the oldest Alaskan glacier ice ever recovered (from a basin between Mt. Bona and Mt. Churchill) is about 30,000 years old.

How old is the oldest ice core?

A previous team led by Higgins recovered a 1 million-year-old ice core from the Allan Hills, which was the oldest ice core ever recorded by scientists when it was reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2015.

What is the oldest ice core sample?

The oldest continuous ice core records extend to 130,000 years in Greenland, and 800,000 years in Antarctica. Ice cores are typically drilled by means of either a mechanical or thermal drill.

What is the highest concentration of CO2 in the past 650 000 years?

387 parts per million
Scientists at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii say that CO2 levels in the atmosphere now stand at 387 parts per million (ppm), up almost 40% since the industrial revolution and the highest for at least the last 650,000 years.

Are we coming out of an ice age?

It turns out that we are most likely in an “ice age” now. So, in fact, the last ice age hasn’t ended yet! It has been going on since about 2.5 million years ago (and some think that it’s actually part of an even longer ice age that started as many as 40 million years ago).