#glacier

#glacier

An Ice Core that Goes Back Five Million YearsIce cores give us an extremely useful timeline of the earth. Scientists drill down through a thick layer of ice and pull up a column that may contain plants, animals, pollen, ash, and other markers that tell us about the earth thousands or even millions of years ago. Air bubbles in their ancient pristine state can be studied, and chemicals like carbon dioxide reveal the earth's conditions from their time.A 31-foot ice core was retrieved from the ice covering Antarctica's Ong Valley in 2017 and '18. Scientists have determined that the ice core is made up of two glaciation events (because glaciers drift), one from three million years ago, and the one underneath is between 4.3 and 5.1 million years! The oldest ice core dated before that was a mere 2.7 million years old. There will be years of analysis of this ancient ice that will tell us more than we ever knew about what happened on earth five million years ago. Read more about this record-breaking ice core at New Atlas. -via Damn Interesting (Image credit: Jaakko Putkonen) #icecore #glacier #Antarctica

Winners of the Nature Conservancy Photo Contest 2021Nature is full of beauty and perfection. Being with nature is like looking at a masterpiece. It's a good thing that a camera exists so that we can capture nature's artwork.Photographers from all over the world share their views of nature for the Nature Conservancy Photo Contest 2021. The photos are breathtaking, inspiring, and even moving. The grand prize winner of the contest catches a western lowland female gorilla 'Malui' walking through a cloud of butterflies. This was captured by Anup Shah in December 2011 at Bai Hokou, Dzanga Sangha Special Dense Forest Reserve, Central African Republic.Check out all the images that won by category over at The Nature Conservancy.Image above: Anup Shah/TNC Photo Contest 2021#nature #photocontest #gorilla

6 Mysterious Structures Hidden Beneath the Greenland Ice SheetYou recall the old joke about place names: Iceland is nice and green, but Greenland is covered with ice. Specifically an ice sheet 9,800 feet (3,000 meters) thick. You might wonder what, exactly, is underneath all that ice. Thanks to radar technology, we are getting an idea, and it appears the geography of Greenland is quite varied. For example, it contains the longest canyon in the world! Discovered in 2013, the canyon stretches 460 miles (740 kilometers) from the highest point in central Greenland to Petermann Glacier on the northwest coast. That's significantly longer than China's 308-mile-long (496 km) Yarlung Tsangpo Grand Canyon, the longest canyon on the planet that you can actually see. The canyon plunges up to 2,600 feet (800 m) deep in places and is 6 miles (10 km) wide. For comparison, the Grand Canyon in Arizona averages about 1 mile (1.6 km) deep and 10 miles (16 km) across. Parts of the canyon may route meltwater from beneath the ice sheet to the sea. It probably formed before the ice sheet and was once the channel for a mighty river. There are also mountains, huge freshwater lakes, meteor craters, fossils, and more! Learn the secrets Greenland is keeping on ice (for the moment) at Space.com. -via Damn Interesting (Image credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/ Cynthia Starr)#Greenland #icesheet #glacier #geography