ReQuest2021 Online Advent Calendar – Day 3

Drilling 3Km Ice Cores

Ice cores are drilled in glaciers and on ice sheets on all of Earth’s continents. Most ice cores, however, come from Antarctica and Greenland, where the longest ice cores extend to 3 kilometers—over 2 miles—or more in depth. Ice cores from the cold interior regions of polar ice sheets provide exceptionally well-preserved and detailed climate records. This is because the lack of melt at these locations does not corrupt the record of trapped gases or blur the record of other impurities. The oldest continuous ice core records extend to 130,000 years in Greenland, and 800,000 years in Antarctica.

(Source: https://icecores.org/about-ice-cores)