Earth & Sky

Ice cores hold Antarctica’s climate secrets

Scientists are looking deep into the ice to reveal Antarctica’s hidden climate history. And they’re finding the future is unlike anything the continent has experienced over the past millennium.

Paul Mayewski: When many of us started working in the Antarctic twenty, thirty plus years ago, our understanding of the Antarctic was that it was a place that was literally unchangeable, because it was so massive. And the thought that you could see ice shelves disintegrating or large regions suddenly getting warmer was unheard of.

Paul Mayewski is the director of the Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine. He’s spent the past two decades traversing Antarctica, collecting ice cores. Ice cores are natural archives of climate history. By studying them, scientists can learn how today’s climate compares to the past thousand years.

According to Mayewski, levels of pollutants found in the ice are much higher than they’ve been in the past thousand years, and greenhouse gases have increased one hundred times faster than at any other time seen in the ice core record. He said that these changes are already making an impact on the continent.

Paul Mayewski: Is it too late to maintain Antarctica exactly as it’s been for the past fifty to a hundred years? Yes, it probably is.

Our thanks today to NASA, in celebration of the International Polar Year.