Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock

news.ku.dk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 356 posts

Re: Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock

#101

Post by blackkettle »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #22
sdfghswe wrote: post #2

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

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...

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.

Re: Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock

#102

Post by etrautmann »

warning26 wrote: post #93
viscanti wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Humanity doesn’t hate itself, we like ourselves, which is why we are so concerned about what we are doing to ourselves. Yeah. The argument that single cellular life or some small animals might survive and eventually evolve into something else is a bit weird for people who are hoping they don't die out like many species have in the past when there have been major changes to climate and carbon levels.

Exactly. People often get lost in this "we must save the planet" argument, but realistically, the planet is gonna be fine. Preventing climate change is about saving humanity , not the planet.

How is this pedantic point useful in any way?

Re: Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock

#103

Post by foota »

barbazoo wrote: post #78
monero-xmr wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Please correct me if I'm wrong. The amplitudes of co2 ppm seem to always have been within a certain band though, topping out at 300ppm. Right now, we're at 420ppm and increasing what looks like exponentially. [0] I'm not saying humans won't be fine but we've never been so dependent on the stability of the climate before. People will die, get displaced, suffer economically, etc as far as I understand. [0] https://www.…

I don't think 800,000 years is that long on the geological time scale. (Not that I don't think global warming is a big deal etc etc)

Re: Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock

#104

Post by px43 »

barbazoo wrote: post #78
monero-xmr wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Please correct me if I'm wrong. The amplitudes of co2 ppm seem to always have been within a certain band though, topping out at 300ppm. Right now, we're at 420ppm and increasing what looks like exponentially. [0] I'm not saying humans won't be fine but we've never been so dependent on the stability of the climate before. People will die, get displaced, suffer economically, etc as far as I understand. [0] https://www.…

It was over 4000ppm during the Cambrian period 500m years ago, then down to about where it is today in the Carboniferious period, during the 60 million year period where trees evolved to make wood, but nothing had evolved to eat it yet, so dead trees literally just piled up for 60 million years. Then during the Mezozoic it went up into the 2000s again, lots of dino farts or something? Then back under 1000 again and dropping until the last 100 years or so.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_at...

Of course, there were also mass migrations and extinctions as the environment changed so radically, which seems like something that would be nice to avoid.

Re: Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock

#105

Post by barbazoo »

foota wrote: post #103
barbazoo wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please correct me if I'm wrong. The amplitudes of co2 ppm seem to always have been within a certain band though, topping out at 300ppm. Right now, we're at 420ppm and increasing what looks like exponentially. [0] I'm not saying humans won't be fine but we've never been so dependent on the stability of the climate before. People will die, get displaced, suffer economically, etc as far as I understand. [0] https://www.…

I don't think 800,000 years is that long on the geological time scale. (Not that I don't think global warming is a big deal etc etc)

It's not but it's also not much less time than what we consider "humans" to have been around and we're talking about co2 in the atmosphere in the context of whether humans will be fine or not.

Of course, for earth it doesn't matter at all.

Re: Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock

#106

Post by altacc »

johnnyApplePRNG wrote: post #71

That's a rate of about 4.3 centimeters per hour. Can anybody elaborate as to why this process takes so long?

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.

Re: Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock

#107

Post by sleet_spotter »

monero-xmr wrote: post #55
sgirard wrote: post #7

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."

[flagged]

A critical piece is the speed at which the climate is warming. The Earth has had much warmer and colder periods in its history that (most) life adapted to. However, life was only able to adapt happened because those changes happened at a sufficiently slow pace. To perhaps put the current trend in the context of geologic time, there have been 5 mass extinctions in the fossil record of life on Earth. These are associated with rapid changes in climate (e.g. asteroid impacts, large volcanic eruptions). Anthropogenic climate change is driving Earth's 6th mass extinction event. To be clear: what is happening now has not happened often in Earth's history. Life has survived, but it has not been pretty. Some alarmism is warranted from the ecosystem collapse alone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

Re: Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock

#108

Post by alberth »

monero-xmr wrote: post #55
sgirard wrote: post #7

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."

[flagged]

> "On the positive, the earth has been much warmer and much colder"

The concern is, during these hotter/colder periods of earth's existence - what happened to life on earth during that time?

Did populations decline? Was life nearly run into extinction (dinosaurs, etc)?

Re: Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock

#110

Post by anigbrowl »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #41

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…

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/
Post reply on HN