Superman's Krypton Aids Hunt for World's Oldest Ice

Hi there! Thanks for clicking by today. I appreciate it. Help yourself to a mug of Arabica juice and a virtual treat while I bend your ear a little. To some people, ice is what they throw in a glass of lemonade. To others, like me, ice is something you have to scrape off your windshield. But ice is also like  a history book, recording events as they occur throughout the ages. So how would scientists find the oldest ice on Earth?

One way to find the oldest ice is to drill ice cores thousands of feet long, which involves expensive, years-long endeavors. But the longest ice cores from Antarctica and Greenland so far have uncovered only about 800,000 years of the planet's warm and cold cycles. 

Another solution is to analyze Antarctica's blue ice. Typically, blue ice forms where mountains block flowing ice, forcing it to surge upward. This brings older ice from the bottom to the surface, where researchers can hack out chunks with a chainsaw or using a small drill rig. Blue ice is also free of surface snow because of wind and sublimation, when snow immediately vaporizes in the air. And just 15 feet (about 5 meters) below the surface, the ice is pristine, untouched by today's atmosphere, Buizert said.

 "You can just chainsaw it up and have as much ice as you want, but the difficulty is figuring out how old it is," Buizert told Live Science's Our Amazing Planet.

Scientists think Antarctica's blue ice is at least 2.5 million years old in some spots, based on meteorites and volcanic ash layers, but they've had trouble proving it. The same chemical-dating techniques that work on soil and rock don't translate well to ice.

Now, Buizert and his co-authors show that analyzing rare krypton isotopes can accurately locate and date very old Antarctic ice. (Isotopes are versions of the same element with different numbers of neutrons in their nuclei.) The findings were published April 21 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"This new krypton method is the most precise way of telling us the age of this old ice," Buizert said.

Aha! Another history lesson, eh! You'll soon know everything there is to know...until they come up with some new stuff for us to learn. It's a bird! It's a plane! No, it's just another load of blue ice...ah, well.

See ya, eh!

Bob on the mend