That's a rate of about 4.3 centimeters per hour. Can anybody elaborate as to why this process takes so long?
Did you store the tube of ice?
Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock
81–90 of 356 posts
Re: Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock
#82Re: Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock
#83If 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.
Re: Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock
#84Interesting: "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."
I'm not a scientist so I'm curious why this is interesting.
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.
Re: Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
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The earth may have survived those changes, but not all its inhabitants may have. So there definitely is still reason to worry as far as humanity is concerned. The major ecological shifts may bring change humanity does not bounce back from.
When the cause for optimism is “some humans will probably survive”, I don’t feel very optimistic
Re: Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock
#86Interesting: "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."
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Quick changes in climate generally lead to extinction events. And indeed we are in the middle of one. And it's caused by us
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
Life will go on. Humans? Maybe. Human civilization will be disrupted for sure
Also: here's a visualization of how fast the climate changed in the last 20000 years vs today
The short term effects are all about the slope. And the short term is all that matter to us, because if we don't pass through this bottleneck we won't have a long term (it may well be our "great filter" preventing us from spreading through the stars)
Re: Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
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I’m not aware of any data that supports humans 120k years ago having a significant impact on the earths climate. I think even our ability to start fire at will is conclusively known to be only ~50,000 years ago.
"Claims for the earliest definitive evidence of control of fire by a member of Homo range from 1.7 to 2.0 million years ago "
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_fire_by_early_hum...
You don't need to be able to start a fire, when you keep the fire burning all the time. And you can do that, once you control the fire and figure out the difference between dry and wet wood.
Also humans are the dominating species on land since quite a while. Hunting certain species to extinctiom has certain effects on the local ecosystem and globally on the global climate. It all adds up.
But things surely changed in dimension since industrialisation.
Re: Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock
#88Interesting: "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."
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More at issue is that rates of change matter.
When temperature rises slowly, ecosystems adapt in parallel to the change. When temperature rises fast, ecosystems don't. And so we have major die-offs of coral and trees, without corresponding colonization in places where they could now live.
When CO2 rises slowly, the ocean's pH is buffered by large deposits of calcium carbonate on the bottom. When CO2 rises fast, we get ocean acidification, which is on track to be the most extreme shellfish extinction event in the last 50 million years.
Therefore larger absolute past climate changes were less likely to have extreme impacts than faster present climate changes.
Re: Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock
#89That's a rate of about 4.3 centimeters per hour. Can anybody elaborate as to why this process takes so long?
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
Re: Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
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People worry about accelerating climate change now because we live here now. It’s not a theoretical science thing. We have farms and cities and towns and bridges and dams and reservoirs in particular places, and we are accelerating the depreciation of many of them. The result will be tremendous loss of wealth, movement of populations, and the associated social consequences of those. Humanity doesn’t hate itself, we l…
> 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.