Studying Earth's climate is pretty important for learning about where we are headed as a planet. Even though some people decry climate change as a modern fad, the planet has constantly been changing since its birth a few billion years ago. The seasons, temperatures and general weather haven't always been the way they are today. Now, scientists have found an unlikely superhero to help them, thanks to a new process that utilizes krypton to measure the age and conditions of ice.
According to Live Science, scientists are using Superman's proverbial Achilles' heel to help find the oldest ice on the planet. Okay okay, technically it's supposed to be kryptonite, but work with me here. The ice samples that researchers are wanting to study are nearly 1.2 million years old. This ice would have been formed during a time in Earth's history when temperature shifts happened about every 41,000 years, versus the 100,000 year cycle we are currently in. Ice that ancient could help them figure out why there was such a huge shift in temperature cycling.
Scientists currently study ice by drilling ice cores, or giant ice tubes, beneath the surface of the planet. To study super old cores, they would need to get thousands of feet below sea level. As of right now, we have only been able to recover ice that dates about 800,000 years into our past. Another method they're developing is to date blue ice which is found in Antarctica where mountains force ice flow to move upward. This force means that ancient ice is much closer to the surface than with ice cores, and can be hacked up into bits by a chainsaw. Just fifteen feet down is ice that has never been touched by Earth's atmosphere.
So what does krypton have to do with studying blue ice? Researchers speculate that this blue ice is almost 2.5 million years old, getting us a lot more data on ancient climate changes. They haven't exactly been able to prove this because dating techniques that work wonderfully at dating rocks and soil just don't work on frozen water. Scientists are now studying rare krypton isotopes in the ice which can show the age more accurately. They've developed a tool which can detect incredibly tiny bits of radioactive krypton-81, and figure out how old ice is by clocking it's decay.
While the dating technique is pretty expensive, as they basically have to melt down gigantic chunks of this blue ice and analyze extracted krypton dotted air at a lab in Illinois, scientists are optimistic. They are hoping that in a few years, they can use less ice and get better data and find methods of dating it quicker. If they've got the power of Superman on their hands, I don't think it will take them long to get the data they're looking for. Just don't let him near the ice.
