“Meteorology is not climatology”
With Prof. Carlo Barbante of the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, senior associate at the Institute of Polar Sciences of the National Research Council (CNR ISP), we explore the importance of the extraordinary results achieved by the project he has coordinated in the Antarctic, “Beyond EPICA – Oldest Ice”, for understanding climate history.
2,800 metres of ice to study 1.2 million years of history
An ice core extracted in the Antarctic, reaching a depth of 2,800 metres, will provide important details on the history of the climate and the Earth’s atmosphere over a period of time stretching back a record 1.2 million years.
This is the initial result, and one of great promise, from the Antarctic campaign for the “Beyond EPICA – Oldest Ice” project. Financed by the European Commission and Coordinated by the Polar Science Institute of the National Research Council (CNR ISP), the project has involved a team of researchers, from twelve scientific institutions in ten different European countries, working in the remote field location of Little Dome C. Over the last four years, the researchers have drilled and analysed ice cores for over 200 days on the Antarctic Polar Plateau, at an altitude of 3,200 m above sea level and with an average summer temperature of -35°C.
Prof. Barbante, can you help us to understand the extraordinary importance of this ice core?
“The project completed in 2005 helped us to retrace the history of the climate back to 800,000 years ago, back to the point of an important change: in the previous period, alternation of warm and cold periods, linked to the inclination of the Earth’s axis, oscillated with an interval of 40,000 years. After this, the oscillations began to become far greater, at around 100,000 years. The reason for this shift remains a mystery. It was therefore necessary to continue, and, in 2020, after a long search for the right location, new coring activity began.”
Not all areas of the Antarctic are suitable for extracting ice cores?
“The ice cap is so thick and heavy that the base portion is pushed out from the sides via glacial flow. This time, we reached the rock beneath, for a record of 1.2 million years, but laboratory analysis will probably enable us to go further still. There are another six consortiums of Americans, Chinese, Russians, Australians, Koreans and Japanese seeking sites for similar analyses.”
What do you expect from analysis of the samples?
Why all this interest? What can be revealed by analysing ice from 1.5 million years ago?
“The future evolution of the climate! We study the past to improve climate models that enable future predictions. But to make these reliable, we must use increasingly reliable models, and this is made possible by testing them over long periods of historical time.”
… so you test the reliability of models on the past, thanks to the fact that predictions are increasingly verifiable, and then apply these models to the future…
“Yes, although some components of the climate system are very unpredictable, scenarios with low probability but high impacts, which are becoming more and more frequent.”
For example?
“There are areas in the Antarctic that are losing mass in a way we had not predicted.”
How will the “Beyond EPICA – Oldest Ice” project continue?
“The samples are still on their way to New Zealand, from where they will travel to Ravenna, to then be distributed across the various laboratories. Next year, parallel coring will begin for a very important sample from the underlying rock.”
Rapid change…
Could the analyses to be conducted also have repercussions for the study of the Alpine cryosphere, with glaciers below 3,000 m set to disappear by 2050?
“Certainly, it all contributes to an understanding of climate systems. In this regard, an interesting study on the glaciers of the Dolomites is ready for publication in the magazine Climate of the Past, conducted by our PhD student Andrea Securo (University of Venice/CNR ISP) into the melting of Alpine glaciers over the last forty years.”
It is always striking how the timescale changes when analysing data from the industrial era onwards. As demonstrated by the EU meteorological service, Copernicus, 2024 was the hottest year since scientific records began. You are trying to share as much information as possible for this reason, but… are people ready to listen?
“This is a part of our mission, within our influence and capabilities, naturally. Few climate-change deniers remain, but there is a wave of what I call ‘neo-climate deniers’, who recognise that global warming is happening but claim that there is still plenty of time to act. And this is simply not true.”
