Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock

https://news.ku.dk/all_news/2023/07/pay-dirt-for-ice-core-scientists-in-east-greenland-as-they-reach-bedrock/

by giuliomagnifico • 3 years ago

558 279 3 years ago

news.ku.dk

sdfghswe• 3 years ago

Can't believe they don't show a photo of what appears to be a 10 meter in diameter, 2.7km deep hole.

giantrobot• 3 years ago

What an ice hole.

JimtheCoder3• 3 years ago

To be fair, is a photo of a hole that interesting?

iknowSFR• 3 years ago

I mean, there’s an entire multi-billion dollar industry dedicated to photos of holes.

peoplearepeople• 3 years ago

yes, people love pictures

mbfg• 3 years ago

Here's a picture of a cat sitting on the hole.

tokai4• 3 years ago

Its more like 5cm in diameter.

dewey• 3 years ago

It's a bit hidden but there's at least a few cool pictures in the "Facts about the EGRIP camp" section (Click the + icon).

There you can see that the actual hole is ~10cm in diameter and the actual drilling site under the snow.

jtsiskin• 3 years ago

Or a video dropping a rock into it

hinkley5• 3 years ago

The camera wouldn't take the picture, and then several of the scientists had to be sedated as they started acting strangely.

j1elo• 3 years ago

As long as they don't come up with schematics to build a white Marker...

FredPret2• 3 years ago

There's a bright future in big holes.

Imagine what we can get our hands on if we could find a nice, cheap way to dig 10+ km down all over the place. The mantle is 2000+km thick. Our deepest mines are 3-4 km deep.

We could also harvest a ton of heat this way - and maybe even use it for garbage disposal. Master Of Orion 2 had the Deep Core Mines and Core Waste Dumps - maybe that's the way to go!

TechBro86152• 3 years ago

Is the idea of using a big hole for garbage disposal that we would dump the garbage into the molten core and let it burn? Or is it more about using the hole as a really deep landfill?

TheRealPomax3• 3 years ago

Ice cores are a few inches across. The photo at the top of the article is not of the drill hole but of the hole they had to dig in the snow to get to the ice they actually drilled.

See the photo of the final ice core [1] to see how miniscule the actual drill hole is.

[1] https://science.ku.dk/english/press/news/2023/pay-dirt-for-i...

Giorgi• 3 years ago

Why is is black and white though? also - how do they transfer energy to drill down 2.7km? or how the hell does it work?

blackkettle2• 3 years ago

The article definitely makes it sound like they had “boots on the ground”. There’s a picture of muddy boots and the caption says they are covered in ancient mud.

chakintosh• 3 years ago

Just for fun:

Volume of ice = π * (radius)^2 * height

where radius = diameter / 2 and height is given in meters.

Volume = π * (10m / 2)^2 * 2700m

Volume ≈ 354,177.66 cubic meters

The density of ice is approximately 917 kilograms per cubic meter.

Weight of ice extracted = Volume * Density of ice

So, the weight of the ice extracted from the hole is approximately 324,856,152.42 kilograms.

Greta must be fuming.

In all seriousness though, ice cores are a few inches in diameter, not 10 meters. Unless they take one of those tunnel boring machines and send it vertically down through earth.

marcosdumay2• 3 years ago

Please, if the title is going to be that, at least remove the capitalization from that "m", so it represents an unity instead of "millions of something undisclosed".

JimtheCoder3• 3 years ago

"so it represents an unity instead"

If you are going to be pedantic, that "an" should be an "a", no?

ksd482• 3 years ago

That’s what I was thinking, yes.

You have to think HOW you pronounce the word. The ‘u’ in “unity” is pronounced as “you” which starts with a consonant. Hence, you use ‘a’ not “an”.

giuliomagnifico• 3 years ago

Hacker News capitalized the “M” by itself.

6D794163636F756• 3 years ago

Thank you for pointing this out. I thought it was referring to the age of the samples taken before reading your comment. It made the abstract less disappointing.

marcosdumay2• 3 years ago

I only clicked on the article because I thought it was the age of the samples too.

porphyra• 3 years ago

Also, a space is needed.

The numerical value always precedes the unit and a space is always used to separate the unit from the number.

The International System of Units. 9th edition, section 5.4.3, page 149. https://www.bipm.org/en/publications/si-brochure

dang2• 3 years ago

Submitted title was "Researchers reached the bottom of ice sheet at -2670m after 7 years of drilling". I've reverted to the article title now, or rather a slightly rewritten version to omit the linkbait.

Our software did screw up the m->M thing. Sorry!

sgirard2• 3 years ago

Interesting: "Towards the base, the ice is more than 120,000 years old and dates back to the last interglacial period, a time when the atmospheric temperature above Greenland was 5°C warmer than today."

newfonewhodis• 3 years ago

I'm not a scientist so I'm curious why this is interesting.

p1esk• 3 years ago

Presumably because we can find well preserved organisms from that time.

downWidOutaFite• 3 years ago

It's not scientifically interesting, the glacial-interglacial cycles are pretty well established. I'm guessing they're trying to insinuate some climate change minimalism argument.

snowwrestler• 3 years ago

I think people who are not already familiar with the known history of the Earth find it interesting that there have been higher CO2 levels and temps than there are now.

And I agree: the history of the Earth is interesting. Which is why so many people study and work in the field of geology.

rolph• 3 years ago

the drilling allows sampling of environmental components over extended period of time. this meas a historic record of, gases, ash, soot, pollen, spores, silt, insects, plant animals, metals, salts.....

detourdog6• 3 years ago

It's interesting because the whole ice cap as we know it is around 120k years ago which I don't consider the long ago on human development scale. This also appears to mean that in the past 120K there wasn't a polar ice cap. I read that as the worst case scenario we should be using for long term planning. This also may help determine how fast the ice was built and how fast it will melt.

I'm completely an armchair ponderer.

sgirard2• 3 years ago

I find it interesting because it raises questions that I don't have answers to. For example:

- What caused the temperature above Greenland to be 5°C warmer than today? Why is it cooler now compared to 120,000 years ago? What causes the interglacial periods? Is glaciation the more common state of the climate?

- The article says the ice sheet is melting at the bottom? Why? Pressure from above? Friction from movement? Heat from the Earth? Something else?

- Was the ice sheet shrinking or growing when the temperatures above Greenland were 5°C warmer than now? Does existence of the ice sheet imply that 5°C warmer for some period of time is not enough to melt the Greenland ice sheet?

- How much climate data has been lost to melting from the bottom? Is the ice sheet thickening or thinning compared 120,000 years ago? How would we know?

- How much has the Greenland land mass moved in 120,000 years due to plate tectonics? Could this have impacted the ice sheet in this short amount of time?

- Humans adapt. How did humans adapt to a climate that was warmer by up to 5°C 120,000 years ago?

- How long did the warm temperatures persist 120,000 years ago? 10,000 years? 50,000 years? Or more?

- Could a cooling climate be more worrisome to humanity than a warming one?

adolph3• 3 years ago

120k years ago in context:

  * 170,000 years ago: humans are wearing clothing by this date.
  * 125,000 years ago: the peak of the Eemian interglacial period.
  * ~120,000 years ago: possibly the earliest evidence of use of symbols etched onto bone
  * 75,000 years ago: Toba Volcano supereruption that may have contributed to human populations being lowered to about 15,000 people

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_prehistory

The Eemian climate is believed to have been warmer than the current Holocene. Changes in the Earth's orbital parameters from today (greater obliquity and eccentricity, and perihelion), known as Milankovitch cycles, probably led to greater seasonal temperature variations in the Northern Hemisphere. During the northern summer, temperatures in the Arctic region were about 2-4 °C higher than in 2011.

The hippopotamus was distributed as far north as the rivers Rhine and Thames. . . . The prairie-forest boundary in the Great Plains of the United States lay further west near Lubbock, Texas, whereas the current boundary is near Dallas. . . . Sea level at peak was probably 6 to 9 metres (20 to 30 feet) higher than today . . . .

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eemian

orangepurple3• 3 years ago

This raises a very critical point. Nuclear is the only dependable energy source. Fossil fuels will run out or go out of favor. Solar and wind on the other hand will become victims of the next major volcanic eruption as ash destroys them or renders them ineffective.

angiosperm4• 3 years ago

There is definite evidence of hominins in North America 130,000 years ago (search "Cerutti mastodon"). Nobody knows if they were H. erectus, Neanderthal, Denisovan, modern humans, or "other", but with an interglacial at 125,000 years ago, it is not hard to see how they could have got here.

wheelerof4te5• 3 years ago

"75,000 years ago: Toba Volcano supereruption that may have contributed to human populations being lowered to about 15,000 people."

The key question is: How much CO2 did that super-eruption emit into the atmosphere?

In our hurry to attribute climate change to our meager impact on this planet, we tend to forget what horrors an eruption of this magnitude can cause. And who knows how many of them happened during the past millennia.

mytailorisrich3• 3 years ago

Iirc, the CO2 concentration now as been pumped up higher than it was then, which is in part what is worrying because temps might then potentially shoot even higher.

Bottom line: we need large scale carbon capture quickly because even if we reach net zero CO2 will take millenia to drop back to the level it was pre-industrial revolution.

Edit: I wouldn't focus on "pre-industrial levels" specifically, the point is that there is too much now so we most likely want concentration to drop as soon as possible.

elzbardico• 3 years ago

Why do we need to get back to the levels pre-industrial revolution?

lehi• 3 years ago

The Keeling Curve is eye-opening for understanding our current versus (pre-)historical CO2 levels: https://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2023/07/introducing-keeling-c...

BurningFrog3• 3 years ago

Bottom line: we need large scale carbon capture quickly

The short term solution/bandaid is pumping SO2 into the stratosphere while we figure out carbon capture.

thomasahle• 3 years ago

See also this timeline of the last four inter-glacial periods: https://co2coalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/104-4000...

It also shows how crazy it would be if we get the projected 2-3 degrees average temperature increase. Even in a period where we'd expect to be going into a new ice age; instead shooting to a previously unseen high temperature.

slashdev4• 3 years ago

On the other hand if we only have 2-3 degrees of warming, if that’s enough to prevent the next ice age, didn’t we just dodge a massive icy bullet? Might we not one day thank ourselves for doing something reckless and stupid that actually worked out?

Yeah a warmer climate brings all kinds of horrible changes. But food still grows in the northern hemisphere. A colder climate is arguably even worse for us.

By the way, that’s no excuse to keep doing what we’re doing. Limiting warning at 2-3 degrees will be nice. Things get really horrific above 4. At some unknown point feedback cycles really kick in and we go to 5-10 degrees and get completely fucked. We really have to not find out where that threshold is.

holoduke• 3 years ago

Would it theoreticaly possible to find frozen animals 120.000 years old with still intact DNA?

sedatk2• 3 years ago

Yeah, DNA in ice has a half-life of a million years. Seems very much possible.

wwwtyro• 3 years ago

What does half-life mean in the context of DNA? One base pair corrupted / unrecoverable? Half of them?

delecti• 3 years ago

Where are you getting that figure? Everything I had ever read on the subject puts the half-life at more like 500 (five-hundred) years. While doing a quick double-check for this comment, it seems there was one sample with the unexpectedly long observed half-life of 15,000 years, still a couple orders of magnitude less than a million years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_DNA#Non-human_aDNA

dekhn2• 3 years ago

The oldest frozen mastodon found is only 30K years ago.

This isn't really "frozen animals" and everything was sort of mixed together so they had to compare remaining fragments to existing sequences:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/07/science/oldest-dna-greenl...

tokai4• 3 years ago

Not an animal, icecore, or that old, but ancient plants has been grown from seeds from permafrost.[0] So who knows what might be found and analyzed from all the icecores.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/21/russian-scient...

roter2• 3 years ago

At approximately the same depth drilled, Antarctica e.g. EPICA @ Dome C yields 8 interglacials [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Project_for_Ice_Corin...

dclowd9901• 3 years ago

I’ve always wondered: what do they do if the shaft snaps somewhere in the middle?

aio2• 3 years ago

This is more for oil drilling, but this is a possibility. https://www.drillingformulas.com/fishing-drill-pipe-procedur...

sleet_spotter4• 3 years ago

I'm not totally sure how systems work for drilling this deep, but typically ice core setups attach the coring apparatus to the surface via a cable that is spooled by a winch. The cable itself ends up being the heaviest part of the system.

ChuckMcM5• 3 years ago

This is a very important project. There is a joke in here about "why not wait 2 years for the ice to melt off if you wanted to look at the mud underneath?" But as the article states, "'This will change climate models because it redefines our basic understanding of how ice moves,' explains Dorthe Dahl-Jensen." Much, if not the majority, of climate science is the creation of models (differential equations mostly) that describe the "response to influence" of the big chunks of things that cause the climate on the planet. The better the model, the better able we are to guess what will happen next (which is sorely needed in a system where you cannot control the input variables by declaration).

One of the big unknowns in the model is "where will the clouds show up?" That unknown stems from our understanding of the water capacity of air by temperature, the increase in air temperature leads to the air holding more water, and water is the basis for cloud formation. If the clouds form "low" they increase albedo and create colder temperatures, if they form "high" they act as a semi-mirrored surface and reflect light that has been reflected from the surface back down for another shot at generating heat.

Much of the IPCC's work has been done in MATLAB[1,2] so if you have a reasonably powerful workstation you can play around with various initial conditions and settings yourself to see what might happen in the future.

No matter what the far future holds, the near future holds more violent storms as storms are powered by the temperature differentials of the air, land, and sea.

It is of note (for me, probably not for many others) that we don't have good models for how an ice age starts. There are a few papers that talk about ice ages being a response to warming (hit a tipping point, generate clouds, and get a "nuclear winter" scenario without the nuclear part). But much of the nuclear winter work has been refined and that scenario is generally considered unlikely AFAICT from what people seem to be publishing these days. Turco's work[3] and things that cite it are a good jumping off point if you want to read up on that. It isn't perfect because smoke/soot are not clouds (different albedo numbers, different cooling attributes) but the accumulation and dispersion of atmospheric obstructions is solid stuff.

[1] Some code and information used to generate plots in the IPCC reports -- https://github.com/IPCC-WG1/Chapter-9

[2] Mathworks trying to get you to buy their climate data toolbox -- https://www.mathworks.com/discovery/climate-stress-testing.h...

[3] Climate and Smoke: an Appraisal of Nuclear Winter -- https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.11538069

wing-_-nuts• 3 years ago

Wow, thanks for the links, this is really neat

earthscienceman• 3 years ago

You're adding important context but I would like to clarify something to highlight just how complex climate change really is. I also am going to make a few related comments, as I do most of my research on melt in Greenland. Full disclosure: I do know some of the people in this article but I have never been to eGRIP specifically. I will be in Greenland in a week nearby though.

   No matter what the far future holds, the near future holds more violent storms as storms are powered by the temperature differentials of the air, land, and sea.

This is true, sort of. There's a lot nuance needed for this broad statement. In particular, "Arctic amplification" means that the pole-to-equator temperature gradient is actually weakening. If you were inclined to believe the covid lab leak theory you would also be inclined to jump on this and say "then the extreme storms are nonsense". However, what's really happening is that the waves in the upper atmosphere ("Rossby waves") are getting more wave-y. Which is really saying that additional energy from CO2 warming is resulting in stronger transport and more significant variability. It's not resulting in larger gradients. Although sometimes the gradients are also extreme.

Climate is a question of two things, time scales and spatial scales. Dumping a bunch of CO2 in the atmosphere messes with both.

I also want to point out that this isn't the first time a core has been dug to the bed of the Greenland ice sheet. It's also not the second. Some comments seem to be implying this. I have a bad taste for science reporting/announcements like this that fail to provide context. Of course this is important work but it's following up and improving on several previous deep core drilling experiments. We still have many samples from these previous cores. This is still a very good thing to research and will hopefully provide important new insight. But there is significant previous work it builds on [1]. And the title kind is vague enough that outsiders/the public might not understand that.

Also also, to be a little vitriolic, the IPCC Matlab code is a crime against humanity and fuck Mathworks.

[1]https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/03/210315165639.h...

sleet_spotter4• 3 years ago

Also work on ice, though not with cores. Just 2nd'ing this as being a great point. Arctic amplification is fascinating and IMO understudied relative to its importance.

The distinction I believe the article is trying to make around the "first-core-to-ground" sentiment, is that this is the first time a core has been drilled through the full thickness of an ice *stream*. These are regions of an ice sheet with very rapidly moving ice. Ice loss from ice streams may have a larger and more immediate impact on sea level than other regions in Greenland and Antarctica. However, I do not actually know whether this is the first core drill ed through an ice stream, but I'm assuming that was the article's intent.

photochemsyn2• 3 years ago

I'd add that although the intergrated yearly average pole-to-equator gradient is indeed weakening, in terms of extreme storms this probably doesn't matter since the gradient is still very strong in winter months in the Northern Hemisphere, and if you pump the atmosphere with more water vapor from the tropics, then intense seasonal storms and extreme flooding can be expected for at least half the year in the Northern Hemisphere - and in midlatitudes, the east-west motion of frontal systems complicates the issue further (though it seems increased water vapor is driving that engine more than anything else).

The Artic amplification effect appears to be having a big effect in the summer months as the decreased gradient allows the polar jet stream to meander southwards, resulting in random persistent blocking events (responsible for recent spate of heat waves) related to Arctic amplification effects on the jet stream (in both hemispheres). Good discussion here:

https://www.carbonbrief.org/jet-stream-is-climate-change-cau...

defrost• 3 years ago

IPCC Matlab code is a crime against humanity and fuck Mathworks.

High five and +1.

the_third_wave• 3 years ago

If you were inclined to believe the covid lab leak theory you would also be inclined to jump on this and say "then the extreme storms are nonsense".

What does the "COVID lab leak theory" and the "belief" in it have to do with this? conflating these two does only one thing, it further polarises and politicises the already heavily polarised and politicised debate around (anthropogenic) "climate change". It is already nearly impossible to have an objective discussion on this subject without conflating it with other similarly polarised subjects so adding this trip wire does not improve things, at all.

anigbrowl2• 3 years ago

A lot of modeling is moving toward Julia, so if you don't want to give money to Mathworks here are some alternatives: https://juliaclimate.github.io/Notebooks/

ChuckMcM5• 3 years ago

I have moved all my "matlab like" work (mostly signal processing) into Octave for that same reason.

javajosh• 3 years ago

Note that the individual license for Matlab is $149/year [0], which isn't crazy IMHO.

0 - https://www.mathworks.com/pricing-licensing.html?prodcode=ML...

aeroman4• 3 years ago

As a "cloud person", I just want to add a few things to the description of how clouds affect the climate (and why high clouds have a wamring effect).

All clouds are white, so they all reflect sunlight back into space (during the day), cooling the Earth.

All clouds are (almost) black in the infra-red, meaning the amount of energy they emit in the infra-red is determined by their temperature. Colder clouds emit less energy.

Almost all clouds are colder than the surface beneath them, which means they emit less infra-red energy to space than a clear day would. This reduces the amount of energy the Earth emits to space, so warming the climate.

High clouds are colder than low clouds, so have a stronger warming effect.

In summary:

Low clouds - Reflect sunlight (cooling), don't trap much infra-red (little warming)- Net: Cooling effect

High clouds - Reflect sunlight (cooling), trap lots of infra-red (stronger warming) - Net: Warming effect

Ilnsk• 3 years ago

I wish I were a cloud person.

crznp• 3 years ago

That's interesting. How relevant is energy transport in comparison to the optical effects?

Eg: my understanding is that hurricanes are net cooling because they transport heat from the ocean surface to the upper atmosphere. Presumably the same can be said for cumulonimbus/thunderheads? Or perhaps it is more relevant when they form in the day and when they dissipate at night?

photochemsyn2• 3 years ago

This IR satellite view of clouds and water vapor centered over N/S America is pretty nice. You can also see the daily pulse of cloud formation over the Amazon rainforest:

https://youtu.be/f7QttjGu628?t=142

kfrzcode• 3 years ago

I will give you the benefit of doubt given it's Hacker News you likely are an expert, but this feels like one of those "sounds too intuitive to be that simple" type complex factors. Any literature on the topic from which I can improve my understand?

almostnormal2• 3 years ago

Not all water vapor is clouds. Where relative humidity is too low it comes with all the warming but none of the cooling effect. A tiny change in humidity (cloud/no cloud) can change things significantly.

credit_guy• 3 years ago

I have a question for a cloud person, maybe you can answer it.

When it rains, where does the latent heat go? The latent heat of evaporation (or condensation) is absolutely huge. Condensation means heat is released. I did a back of the envelope calculation. 2 mm daily rainfall x 500 million km2 = 10^15 kg; each kg of water holds 2.26 MJ of latent heat, and there are 86400 seconds in a day, so that's 26.15 W, so overall 26150 TW. The Earth receives about 173000 TW from the Sun, so this is about 15% of the energy received from the Sun. Obviously, not all the 15% goes out to space, but about how much does go to space?

samstave6• 3 years ago

It would seem to me, that the best way to do long-scale climate models of a body ; knowing its composition in layers over time is really important to be able to calculate the flow of the layers of composition as particles.

Think of the experiment of light as wave/particle...

Glacial/geological scales operate as thus ; as physical masses of particles, but move in more wave-like manners - so you'll have material suspended and located in the overall mass based on how they were consumed as a particle, but the characterists of the glacial mass will appear to be acting like fluid waves.

So maybe if you know the timeline of a glacial flow, you can predict where the most particulate-glacial-slurry is held (thus minerals, biologic wash off in certain events etc.

ChuckMcM5• 3 years ago

Perhaps? Not sure I'm following the methodology you're suggesting. Most (perhaps all?) of the climate models I've read about or played with are based on energy balance. (energy in vs energy out)

Start with Solar insolation (energy in) then subtract all the ways that energy leaves the planet (reflection and radiatively from the atmosphere.) Then add that the planet is its own heat source (molten core and all that) and that energy contribution. Then add variable convection to the atmosphere based on latitude. The list goes on and on (which is kind of like harmonics in a Fourier series).

Then random things pop out like how reducing the weight of ice (by melting) increases volcanic activity kinds of things.

worldmerge• 3 years ago

I would like to ask in general to the group. How do I get a job doing field work? Like working on sensors but then also going outside and working and doing analysis?

ChuckMcM5• 3 years ago

Become a grad student or post doc? Alternatively you could get a doctorate in the science of your choice and then join and agency that is using that science in its mission.

johnnyApplePRNG• 3 years ago

That's a rate of about 4.3 centimeters per hour.

Can anybody elaborate as to why this process takes so long?

klyrs2• 3 years ago

I've never drilled a hole with 10m diameter before, but I imagine they've been more careful about taking and studying cores than you were.

Zamiel_Snawley• 3 years ago

Surely you mean 10cm?

roter2• 3 years ago

Did you store the tube of ice?

lexicality• 3 years ago

it's a very high aspect ratio hole (267:1) so they have to peck-drill it and it takes a very long time to lift the drillbit to remove the swarf from the end

dtgriscom2• 3 years ago

I'm going to see if I can work the term "swarf" into conversation tomorrow. (We all need goals.)

altacc2• 3 years ago

It's not a continuous 24/7/365 process. They have a drilling season each year, I believe about 6-8 weeks, have drilled at 2 different sites and been interrupted by the pandemic.

jppope• 3 years ago

why was ice drilling interrupted by the pandemic?

sleet_spotter4• 3 years ago

As the hole gets deeper, the amount of time to bring up core sections and send the drill back down become significant. That combined with the previously mentioned short field season. Drilling more than a few hundred meters becomes very difficult logistically as well, especially in such a remote setting.

mywittyname• 3 years ago

Like fetching the n-th element from a linked list by starting at the first node.

foota• 3 years ago

Who knew, drilling is O(N^2)

drKarl• 3 years ago

I believe the deeper the layer of ice, the thougher it is, so at the surface is relatively easy to drill but at those depths it might be like drilling on steel.

mr-wendel• 3 years ago

If drilling big holes for scientific research is your thing, I suggest https://usoceandiscovery.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Casc... as an interesting read about earthquakes and tsunamis.

A quick summary:

  > Geophysical and hydrological observatories in sealed boreholes provide a powerful tool to understand the hydrology of crustal formations, a means measure the hydrologic signal from changes in volumetric strain, and a stable site for high quality seismic and geodetic instrumentation.

This data is not just useful on its own, but also when correlated to other research. For example, 400+ years ago there was a large earthquake (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1700_Cascadia_earthquake) off the US Pacific Northwest coast (and corresponding tsunami in Japan) that is referenced.

bobske3• 3 years ago

At the mountains of madness

toshk• 3 years ago

I love humans.

They somehow decided to start drilling, and not give up & get funding for 7 years.

We are a crazy but exciting bunch of organisms.

uncletammy• 3 years ago

We are a crazy but exciting bunch of organisms.

I read this as "crazy but extinct bunch of organisms"

mensetmanusman2• 3 years ago

Also read extinct. Ha. Would be cool to know how to detect and exploit these speed reading induced recognition errors to write things that force people to slow down or go extinct :)

midoridensha2• 3 years ago

I read this as "crazy but extinct bunch of organisms"

That'll be true too, eventually. The way we're going now, it might not even be that long...

I think we should build a monument on the Moon with an archive of data of our cultures (including a copy of Wikipedia), built to survive for as long as possible, so that alien explorers can learn about us after we destroy ourselves, and learn how we managed to do so so they don't repeat the same mistake.

hk__2• 3 years ago

That’s because we are social animals. We tend to do things not only for ourselves, but also to contribute to the society we live in.

m3kw9• 3 years ago

Have a drink?

samstave6• 3 years ago

There is a design for an ice-melting-slurry-bot that could be made, where the outer diameter of the bore is melted by heat/lasers - where the lasers/heat is also projected into a cone at the point of the bore-ing machine, where the center pipe is a vacuum to slurp up the slurry as it melts the ice around the bore-head...

BenjiWiebe• 3 years ago

You aren't going to be able to vacuum slurry up from several km down.

bequanna• 3 years ago

Even with a very small diameter hose/pipe?

hanniabu• 3 years ago

That would ruin the core samples

samstave6• 3 years ago

We dont want the core samples intact (we want to kill microbiologics on the way down to the goal, which is the crust and determination for other vacuous caverns under the ice, via both vertical and horiz boring. and cameras in crytal lenses to withstand the heat or polarize against the lightwaves of the lasers such that they are clear and a good image can be seen.

/Sci-fi..

My original comment is my idea based on the 1960s patents for nuclear tunnel boring machines which use the reactor heat to exchange the tunnel walls to molten glass... (And I am really into DUMBS - as are many)

https://patents.google.com/patent/US3885832A/en

There are a lot of patents like this - so dont think this line of thought was abandoned, Hello Musk's Boring company... Good thing hes connecting State on a Deep level.

albert_e• 3 years ago

what is the risk of uncovering ancient viruses and bacteria from permafrost that we don't have immunity to

hannasanarion• 3 years ago

Very very very low. Bacteria and viruses are normally very sensitive to their hosts, they have a kind of symbiosis that means they can't just arbitrarily infect any species they bump into.

Jumping between species does happen, and when it happens it can be a big problem (see COVID-19, Swine Flu), but there is something like 100 million different virus species out there [1], and only 200 or so are able to infect humans [2]. Despite constant interaction between people and all other species of viral host all over the globe, and millions of brand new new virus exposures daily, jumps are still so rare that they are decade-defining when they happen.

1. https://virology.ws/2013/09/06/how-many-viruses-on-earth/

2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3427559/

Clamchop• 3 years ago

I read a book, How to Clone a Mammoth, by ancient DNA researcher Beth Shapiro.

If what she wrote holds true deep in these glaciers (which take a long time to form so they presumably weren't always buried so deep), then the answer to what the risk may be is "very remote". DNA and RNA disintegrates into very small tatters pretty easily, turns out, frustrating the reconstruction of ancient genomes. Bacteria are definitely dead on multiple counts and viruses will be shredded.

Archelaos• 3 years ago

Here is an article from 2021 that covers that topic:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42398-021-00184-8

From the conclusions: "... as shown by recent outbreaks of diseases caused by supposed to be extinct microbial pathogens immured in glacial ice for centuries, there is a serious risk for future epidemics (or even pandemics) to happen more often."

anon25783• 3 years ago

Negligible. You're far more likely to fall ill from bacteria in your garbage disposal or fungi in your bathroom.

deafpolygon• 3 years ago

Isn't this the basically the plot to the prequel of The Thing?

mr_toad• 3 years ago

Digging too deeply has been a plot point in many stories.

There’s even an urban legend that a failed Soviet borehole project broke into ‘hell’

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well_to_Hell

taf2• 3 years ago

From the picture that looks like a pretty large hole... any chance that execrates the melting process by increasing the surface area? Or is it insignificant just curious if someone has thought about or done any calculations...

robotnikman• 3 years ago

electromechanical drill designed to take 122 mm (4.8-inch) diameter ice cores

Interesting that they choose 122mm as the core size when designing the drill. It makes me wonder if its built from a decommissioned and repurposed 122mm artillery gun barrel.

stainablesteel• 3 years ago

so how do they know its not just a big rock covered in frozen mud with more ice below it

almostnormal2• 3 years ago

Two numbers from the article: The oldest ice is 120000 years old. The ice is moving at 58 m/years.

If these numbers are correct the oldest ice has travelled almost 7000 km. Greenland isn't that large, and it did not shrink. The age estimate is probably correct.

The speed must have been a lot lower in the past?

Deskegende• 3 years ago

Or it was moving in a different direction

macinjosh• 3 years ago

I have a hard time trusting climate data from before we had satellites or other forms of precise automated recording. If climate scientists are telling us they _know_ detailed information about global atmospheric temperatures, greenhouse gas concentrations, etc. over millions years because they cored some ice from a select set of places on earth, I just don't know how an average person is supposed to believe that. It appears to the layman to be data generation on par with an episode of CSI where the lab somehow 'enhances' low res photos to high res.

Where are the million year long experiments demonstrating how ice and its contents changes over such long time spans, that vast majority of which we were not even conscious for as a species? It is too many variable to fit into any sort of computing technology today, and the science is mostly based on statistics which everyone knows can be twisted easily.

abenga• 3 years ago

There are thousands and thousands of papers with specific models. Do you have specific criticism of any of them other than a hand-wavy "I don't understand them, so they are probably untrustworthy"?

yieldcrv• 3 years ago

The researchers literally got mud from under the ice cap on their feet.

stop the presses!

why is this article written this way? a mixture of factual science and juvenile exuberance.

mble• 3 years ago

They can use this method to break the bedrock and reach the void - https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Tutorials/Breaking_bedrock...

It is important to note that you need to be very careful near the void, as it is very hard to escape, and 64 blocks down you get instant damage which would get you killed.

gffrd• 3 years ago

Finally, a new ice product for cocktail enthusiasts to fetishize.

Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock

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