Monday, August 06, 2007

A view into history

Looking through this piece of glacial ice you can see tiny bubbles of trapped air. Glaciologist's take ice core samples from 100's of meters down,they can see in these cores year bands just like in a tree. They then take ice samples from the bands place them in a machine where they are melted and the air released can be analyzed to find out the make up of the gas. The main gases of interest is Carbon dioxide and methane(greenhouse gases) they have found there has always been ups and downs in the amount of carbon dioxide but the recent samples have found the CO2 is rising steeply and much faster than ever before.
A worrying trend for the future.

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