, a postdoctoral associate in the University of Rochester鈥檚 , recently recorded a video that has since gone viral that shows the 鈥渦nexpected and fascinating gunshot noise the ice makes鈥� when it hits the bottom of a borehole in Antarctica. Neff suspects the sound is due to either a reverberation or the Doppler effect.
??Sound ON??
When is done, it’s fun to drop ice down a 90 m deep borehole in an ?? 鉂�. So satisfying when it hits the bottom.
Happy hump day.
鈥� Peter Neff (@peter_neff)
The ice is amazing for reasons other than the bizarre noise it makes when it falls, however. Climate scientists like Neff and , an associate professor of Earth and environmental sciences at 糖心logo use ice cores鈥攃ylinders of ice 10 inches in diameter and weighing up to 80 pounds鈥攖o learn about the earth鈥檚 past climate.
The researchers drill boreholes to remove ice cores from sites in Antarctica and Greenland. Tiny bubbles trapped in the ice contain ancient air that is up to hundreds of thousands of years old. By extracting and studying the air, climate scientists gain clues about past climate patterns, which can help them understand future climate change. In fact, using data from ice cores, Rochester researchers recently reported two big findings: human-made and it鈥檚 unlikely future warming will trigger a release of natural Arctic methane reservoirs.
鈥淢y overarching research interest is to use glacier ice as a medium for understanding the past and future evolution of Earth鈥檚 climate and environment,鈥� Neff says. 鈥淭here are so many questions we can explore just through the information trapped in the ice.鈥�
These & other ice cores are how we know atmospheric CO2 / concentrations over the last 800,000 years.
Glacier ice traps ancient air, caught in the space between snowflakes 鉂� as they are compressed into ice. Bubbly glacier ice on R, pure lab-made ice on L.
鈥� Peter Neff (@peter_neff)
