Live Science Reports on Antarctic Climate Change Research – Mayewski, Kurbatov, Spaulding, & Introne
Live Science reported on climate change research conducted by a team of scientists including Paul Mayewski, Andrei Kurbatov, Nicole Spaulding and Douglas Introne from the Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine. The article, “Million-year-old bubbles reveal Antarctica’s oldest climate snapshot,” focused on research led by John Higgins, a geochemist at Princeton University. Higgins’ co-authors included Mayewski; Michael Bender, also of Princeton; and Ed Brook of Oregon State University. The researchers uncovered a one-million-year-old ice core from Antarctic blue ice in a region called the Allan Hills, according to the article. Bubbles inside the ice provide a glimpse in Earth’s ancestral climate because gases such as carbon dioxide and methane were trapped and preserved inside the bubbles when snow fell in the past, the article states. The researchers said the core offers the oldest record of Earth’s climate from Antarctic ice.