Million year-old bubbles could solve ice age mystery
The core was slowly pulled from the ice sheet using a drill machinery and scientists carefully carefully cleaned the ice using cloths.
It is now being cut into one metre pieces for transportation at -50C from Antarctica by boat.
The pieces will eventually reach the freezers of numerous European institutions, including the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, where scientists will begin their analysis.
Experts want to understand what happened in a period 900,000 to 1.2 million years ago called the Mid-Pleistocene Transition.
At this time, the length of the cycle between cold glacial and warm interglacials switched from being 41,000 years to 100,000 years. But scientists have never understood why.
This is the same period when, according to some theories, the ancestors of present-day humans almost died out, perhaps dropping to around just 1000 individuals.
Scientists do not know if there is a link between this near-extinction and the climate, explains Prof Barbante, but it demonstrates it is an unusual period that it is important to better understand.
“What they will find is anybody’s guess but it will undoubtedly enlarge our window on our planet’s past,” Professor Joeri Rogelj from Imperial College in London, who was not involved in the project, told BBC News.
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