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Antarctica shining in the Las Vegas Sun
Hundreds of miles inland on Earth’s coldest, windiest continent, the snow-covered terrain is flat and vast, the sky huge.
Antarctica, sprawling across the planet’s southernmost reaches, has no arable land, no true permanent residents. Winter brings perpetual darkness.
And it’s this strange world, largely untouched by humans, that could yield some of the most telling clues about how man’s activity could alter Earth’s climate.
A team of researchers led by Desert Research Institute scientist Kendrick Taylor is engaged in a $30 million to $50 million project to extract and analyze an 11,360-foot column of ice from Antarctica, an undertaking that will reveal new information about how the planet’s climate has evolved over the past 100,000 years.
Read more of this story in the Las Vegas Sun newspaper.
WAIS Divide Ice Coring and Antarctic Climate Change Science on CBS television news
Welcome to the Earth's air conditioner. At the South Pole it's 48 degrees below zero on a typical summer day. Antarctica holds 90 percent of the Earth's ice - that's seven million cubic miles of it.
At the South Pole, the enormity of the Antarctic Ice Sheet is striking. Beneath the spot on Antarctica where CBS News correspondent John Blackstone reported, the ice is two miles thick, and it stretches over an area larger than the United States and Mexico combined. The ice is so thick, it buries entire Antarctic mountain ranges.
It's so cold at the South Pole, the snow never melts; it just turns to ice and gets thicker. Now the secrets of the ice are coming into focus.
"For me, the really cool thing about Antarctic ice is the bubbles," said Kendrick Taylor, a Glaciologist from the Wais Divide Ice Core Project.
Those bubbles are samples of the earth's ancient atmosphere, trapped in the ice. For Taylor, the ice is like a library, stacked with climate records going back thousands of years. He expects his ice core samples will confirm a key argument in global warming.
"The current levels of greenhouse gases are much higher than they've been at any time during the last 650,000 years, and it's all due to human activity," he said.