"Ice cores" where the earth climate information of 22,000 years ago was recorded disappears due to freezer breakdown

Drilled from the ice sheet with a drill excavator "Ice cores"Is filled with information on the ancient Earth's climate. It was revealed that the ice core "climate information hidden climate information before 2000 years ago" collected from the Arctic Circle of Canada melted and disappeared due to the malfunction of the freezer used for storage.

22,000 years of history evaporates after freezer failure melts Arctic ice cores | Environment | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/apr/16/arctic-ice-cores-melt-university-alberta-canada

Since the Arctic ice sheet preserves the snow crystals, gases, particles, etc. that fell in the older age as going down, guess what kind of climate the earth was in the ancient when we looked at the ice sheet can. Therefore, by analyzing "ice core" extracted with an excavator with the ice sheet facing downward, it is possible to know the climate of the ancient earth. From the ancient to the present age, the ice core that gives us the essential information to investigate the climate change of the earth was cut out and transported, it was kept in a freezer attached to the research facility and analyzed carefully It will become.


At the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, the ice core drilled from the Arctic Circle was kept, but part of it was completely melted due to a freezer failure, valuable research materials were lost, The Guardian reported It was.

University of Alberta mined an ice core core of 1,400 meters in length from the Arctic Circle of Canada territory and stored it in 5 facilities. Samples of this valuable ice sheet core were kept in a research facility with a construction cost of 4 million Canadian dollars (about 330 million yen) just completed in April 2017, but after several days from the start of storage A temperature warning was issued from one freezer. The freezer started to rapidly rise in temperature, reaching 40 degrees in the blink of an eye in a flash, and the researcher who came running seems to have discovered a pool of puddles on the floor, not ice. Dr. Martin Sharp, who studies glaciers, commented on the accident about "There is a No.1 nightmare at every ice core core storage facility on Earth."

However, fortunately, the thing that was affected was that it was an ice core of 180 meters, which is 13% of the total. Because we received a complaint saying "Writing is bad" in television shooting that was done the other day, about 90% of the stored ice core core was transferred to another freezer, so it was effective and the entire ice core core He seems to have escaped being lost.

Nonetheless, some of the lost ice core cores include those collected from "Penny Ice Cap" on Baffin Island, 22,000 years ago or from the Logan Mountains, the ice sheet core of 16 million years ago As it contains such things as that, lost things are big. Dr. Sharp says that the incident will be affected, such as some studies scheduled to be useless, due to the incident, "I am disappointed with losing ice with interesting information." At Albert University it is difficult to go to mining to the Arctic Circle to replace the lost or damaged ice core core, so it is difficult to continue to minutely protect the remaining ice core core is.