The climate of the past will be studied using ice samples from Antarctica that are more than 1 million years old

Photo by: oversnap / iStock

The 68th Russian Antarctic Expedition (RAE) of the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute will start on 15 November 2022. Participants in the expedition plan to extract a core of ancient ice, more than 1 million years old, from the thickness of the glacier above Lake Vostok in Antarctica. In this way, scientists will be able to obtain information about the climate of the past, Alexander Klepikov, head of the AARI Russian Antarctic Expedition, explained.

“The thick ice over Lake Vostok is four kilometres thick, with the upper three kilometres containing an undisturbed atmospheric signal, where air bubbles and other inclusions very accurately reconstruct the past climate. This is by far the most accurate method. The last 100 metres, the bottom layer of the glacier in front of Lake Vostok, contains no atmospheric signal. The ice in the intermediate layer is quite ancient, the signal is preserved there, but it is difficult to extract it, and now there are technologies which allow to extract information from this ice,” — Klepikov said.

During the last expedition, ice core of about 567 thousand years old was extracted from a depth of 3.4 km. The samples obtained are now being examined not only by AARI scientists, but also by specialists from the Limnological Institute of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Irkutsk.

In total during the 68th expedition scientists will carry out several dozens of scientific works in the system “atmosphere — ice cover — ocean”. AARI specialists will study the Antarctic natural environment and global climate changes at Russian Antarctic stations and seasonal field bases.

Work will also continue on studying the concentration and distribution of plastic debris in order to determine the sources of its entry into the Southern Ocean. This will be a continuation of research of the last 67th RAE expedition, during which water samples were already taken for microplastic particles.

A recent study by scientists has discovered the presence of a 460-kilometre-long river beneath Antarctica’s ice that is influencing the melting of a glacier.

Cover photo: Ray Hems / iStock