As the summer of 2024 is on track to become the hottest on record, scientists are digging deep into the Earth's coldest corners to recover an icy record of what the atmosphere was like hundreds of thousands of years ago. 'It's amazing that we have this ability to see back into time and see that the Earth's environment, including the climate, has changed radically and in many different ways,' said University of California, Berkeley professor Kurt Cuffey.
'From this cylinder, which is about this big, we can retrieve all kinds of information about past climate,' said Rasmussen.One example of data that can be recovered is stored in the trapped air bubbles found in the layers. These are little pockets of atmosphere that are frozen as the snow turns into hardened ice. 'So, in compressing snow to ice, we capture tiny, tiny, tiny samples of the past atmosphere,' said Rasmussen.