MELBOURNE, Jan. 7 (Xinhua) -- The Australian Antarctic Division's custom-built drill has collected its first deep ice core, marking a major step toward recovering a 1-million-year-old climate record.
The ice core drill extracted a nearly 1-meter core at a depth of 151 meters at Dome C North, about 1,200 km inland from the Casey research station, one of Australia's three research outposts in Antarctica, a statement of the Australian Antarctic Program said Wednesday.
The milestone follows seven years of development of the 8.4-meter-long drill, designed to drill ice more than 3,000 meters deep and operate in temperatures below minus 55 degrees Celsius and under extreme pressure, it said.
The operation is part of Australia's Million Year Ice Core (MYIC) project, which aims to extract ice all the way to the Antarctic bedrock, 3,000 meters below.
The ice will contain trapped gases and chemicals providing a continuous record of Earth's past climate, extending well beyond the current 1.2-million-year ice core climate record, scientists said.
MYIC science lead Joel Pedro said the full-length ice core could help explain a major shift in ice age cycles and improve climate predictions.
"An ice core record of over one million years can help us answer why that shift in the climate state occurred, and that will provide really important information to test models and better predict climate in the future," Pedro said.
Field teams have been working since late November to set up the remote site, including installing a 4-tonne winch to handle the deep drill.
Drilling will continue until late January before the onset of colder conditions halts work, according to the MYIC project team. ■
