The world's oldest ice cores, extracted in Antarctica as part of the "Beyond Epica - Oldest Ice" project, funded by the European Commission and coordinated by the CNR Institute of Polar Sciences, are on their way to Europe aboard the research vessel "Laura Bassi".
The ice samples, extracted from a depth of up to 2,800 meters, will be processed and analyzed in laboratories at European research institutions and will reveal fundamental details about the history of Earth's climate and atmosphere, dating back more than 1.2 million years.
The protagonist of this historic foundation campaign is a team of scientists and logistics personnel from 12 research institutions in ten European countries. For three months they worked in an average summer temperature of -35 degrees, extracting ice samples from depths of up to 2,800 meters, where the Antarctic ice sheet meets the bedrock.
Stored in containers that guarantee a cold chain at -50 degrees, the carrots will first arrive in Ravenna on April 16. From there, they will continue to the Alfred Wegener Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) in Bremerhaven, Germany, where they will be harvested. The samples obtained in this way will be sent to the various laboratories of the European research institutions involved in the project, where analyses will begin in the fall.
The research team expects to extract from these analyses essential information to reconstruct the history of Earth's climate, on atmospheric temperatures and greenhouse gas concentrations, dating back more than 1.2 million years. (A2 Televizion)
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