The study of Antarctic ice cores reveals to science what the level of carbon dioxide was in the planet’s atmosphere, allowing us to study the climate of the past
Disease outbreaks in the past, such as Black Plague, may have changed the Earth’s atmosphere. The discovery came, unusually, from ice cores from Antarctica, where information on carbon dioxide present on the planet is preserved.
- Researchers mine 5-million-year-old ice in Antarctica
- The ice collected in the Alps contains the climatic documentation of the last ten thousand years
Stored air bubbles Southern frozen cores they manage to preserve gaseous samples from thousands and even millions of years ago, demonstrating how human presence – or lack thereof – can greatly affect the Earth. The study of these cores was examined by paleoclimatologist Amy King and his team at the British Antarctic Survey, who published their findings in the journal Nature communications.
Two ice cores in particular constitute the best preserved evidence of the last 2 thousand years: the Law Dome, a sort of Antarctic ice hill, and the center of Antarctic ice sheet Western.
Frozen records of the past
2,000 years ago, events like the Eruption of Vesuvius and ancient wars plagued humanity and similar diseases bubonic plague and syphilis infected our species before and after the millennium mark. Although Law’s Dome and the ice centers of West Antarctica complement each other most of the time, there are some discrepancies in their records.
At Law’s Dome it is possible to observe a precipitous decline in CO2 levels over 90 years, reaching the lowest limit in 1610 AD. Added to this are the effects of first contact between the populations of the Old World and the New World, when the Diseases passed from European colonizers to Native Americans, who also infected the invaders with their own pathogens.
The population decline was so strong that historians point to the abandonment of previously populated areas, which allowed local vegetation to regrow. Naturally reforested, these regions would have absorbed a lot of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, generating the perceived decline in Law’s Dome.
The problem is that West Antarctica does not show such a sharp decline, but rather a gradual decline in CO2, ending later in the 17th century. To calculate a better average, scientists drilled another ice core, the Skytrain Ice Height, between 2018 and 2019.
The new core’s gas records span from 1454 AD to 1688 AD and indicate a more gradual decline, in line with that of the West Antarctic cores. There are 0.5 ppm (particles per million) per decade between 1516 AD and 1670 AD
Together with carbon flux models of the time and estimates of terrestrial vegetation, the conclusion was that the decline observed at Law Dome is implausible, even though there is a paucity of ancient population data. However, according to scientists, an unknown carbon absorption event cannot be ruled out.
Source: Nature communications
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