Author: Hanna Sophie

Rainforest in Antarctica?

Let’s talk about deep time!

by Hanna Knahl

Figure 1 – This is how Antarctica might have looked like 90 Million years ago. Source: Alfred-Wegener-Institut / James McKay

“Rainforest in Antarctica” sounds like an April fool? Or like a climate apocalypse scenario for the future? It actually was real. Let’s go deep back in time to the fascinating epoch of the dinosaurs!

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Steps Back into the Past of the Ice Cores and the Planet

About Ice Cores Part III

by Hanna Sophie Knahl

Ice cores preserve stories of the past. Now we want to compare these stories  with other history books. Illustration: Hanna Knahl

We have now already learned a lot about ice cores. We know where to find them, how to drill them and how to extract information about the past climate from them. BUT there is still one important piece of information missing. The time stamp. How do we determine how far back in time the ice we hold with our gloved hands comes from? We will see, the ice also uses special languages to encode this secret.

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The Studies of the Historical Books Made of Ice

About Ice Cores Part II

by Hanna Sophie Knahl

Cross-section of an ice core. Photo: Sepp Kipfstuhl

In the first article about ice cores, we learned why ancient stories lie dormant in the ice. We got to the icy library and looked at how the stories can be recovered in the form of ice cores. This article will deal with the question how we can reveal the stories of the ice cores. To do this, we need to understand the different languages of the ice.

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The Story of Giant Libraries Made of Ice

About Ice Cores Part I

by Hanna Sophie Knahl

A transforming icy library slowly descending towards the valley. Glacier in the northeast of Greenland. Photo: Jan Rohde

On earth there is a lot of ice and snow and not only in winter – at least at the moment. At the poles there are huge sheets of ice and in between exist many smaller and larger glaciers on high mountains. Stories are preserved in the ice. Stories from long ago. How this happened and how these stories can be brought to the surface, we will learn in this article.

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