The Ice Core Archive is a giant freezer in Copenhagen with 25 kilometres of ice collected mostly from Greenland. It is helping scientists understand changes in the Earth’s climate.
“What we have in this archive is prehistoric climate change, a record of man’s activities in the last 10,000 years,” said glaciology professor Jorgen Peder Steffensen from the University of Copenhagen.
The frozen samples are made of compressed snow. “All the airspace between the snowflakes is trapped as bubbles inside, [and] the air inside these bubbles is the same age as the ice,” Steffensen said.
The samples in the archive can help scientists predict how much sea levels could rise and learn about what Earth’s atmosphere was like before man-made pollution.
“We can also see the impact of the burning of fossil fuels in modern times,” Steffensen said.
