Antarctic Thesaurus
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ice berg ice cap ice cave ice core ice flowing ice forming icescape indescribable
ice core
Scientists examine cores of ice, drilled from ice sheets and glaciers. Analysis of chemicals in the air bubbles trapped inside them, and of water of melted in slices of this ice reveal evidence of past climate change. Shapes of life forms that would have been trapped for eons in layers of ice, can, as yet, only be imagined.
The viewer of your work might misinterpret what THEY see as 'factual', whereas it is your response to stuff YOU'VE learned and only you know what is interpreted and what is real.
I wish you really could see critters in the ice like that, but sadly it's extremely difficult to see anything. I've tried using a scanning electron microscope to look at particles in ice cores but the particles are mostly dust and below 2 microns. I'd love to look for critters - as I do believe they are there, but I don't know what they would be - probably bacteria and pollen. It's an area of research that has not been tapped into in the ice core community as a whole, mainly because there is so much else to do, and this particular work is extremely difficult to do without contaminating the sample!
Barbara Frankel, Glaciologist
Australian Antarctic Division
and the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre
Hobart, April 2008
