Ice archive 01 2008

Engraved Perspex disks
with acrylic inlay,
50mm diameter (x8)
Up-lit with white LED light

Artist's collection, Sydney

Scientist Dominic Hodgson
described in an Interview
in Cambridge 2008,
how evidence of our impacts
on the global environment
is trapped in Antarctic ice cores:

The concentration of carbon dioxide
is now higher than at any other time
in the last 850,000 years.
We know that absolutely for a fact
because we can measure
the trapped bubbles in the ice.
And those trapped bubbles
go back 850,000 years.

There's an ice core called Dome C.
You simply get those bubbles out.
You measure the composition
of the gasses in those bubbles.
You measure how much C02 there is.

So we know
that even with these massive swings in climate,
between glacial and interglacial states,
the C02 level has never gone beyond
the level which it is today,
that we've introduced into the atmosphere.