Longest Antarctic Ice Core Ever Recovered Reaches Back 740,000 Years

[hatrack]

"Scientists have successfully drilled through an Antarctic ice sheet to extract the longest ice core ever recovered, according to a report published today in the journal Nature. The cylinder of ice dates back nearly three-quarters of a million years and will help researchers better understand our planet’s history of cyclical climate variation.

"This has the potential to separate the human-caused impacts from the natural and place it in a much clearer context," explains James White of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado at Boulder, who was not involved in the research but penned a commentary on the find for this week’s issue of the journal Science.

An international collaboration known as the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica (EPICA) recovered the nearly three-kilometer-long core from a region of the East Antarctic ice sheet known as Dome C. The bottom of the10-centimeter-wide cylinder dates to some 740,000 years ago and nearly doubles the reach of the next-longest ice core, which was drilled at Vostok, Antarctica, in the 1980s and spanned the past 420,000 years."

EDIT

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa003&articleID=000352EA-658A-10C7-A58A83414B7F0000

[Trajan]

1. Wow ....

Mankind has been literate for 5000 years ...

He made the wheel 4500 years ago ...

He made towns 8000 years ago ...

He has been agricultural for 10000 years ....

Man's time as a civilized being on this earth is SO small, so miniscule, it is hardly worth noting his existence ....

[ewagner]

2. Mind-boggling isn't it?

Humans in gerneral are arrogant sobs.....sort of nice to keep things in perspective.........

[phantom power]

3. And 750K years is itself a drop in the bucket

less than 1/4000 the age of the earth.

[pauliedangerously]

4. Oh, but didn't you know....

that the earth was created 6,000 years ago? Snort, snort.