Antarctic team digs deep to predict climate future

In this photo taken on Friday, March 8, 2013, scientist Nancy Bertler stands in a laboratory freezer in front of boxes of ice she collected from Antarctica, near Wellington, New Zealand. Antarctica's pristine habitat provides a laboratory for scientists studying the effects of climate change. (AP Photo/Nick Perry)AP

WELLINGTON, New Zealand -- Nancy Bertler and her team took a freezer to the coldest place on Earth, endured weeks of primitive living and risked spending the winter in Antarctic darkness, to go get ice -- ice that records our climate's past and could point to its future.

They drilled out hundreds of ice cores, each slightly longer and wider than a baseball bat, from the half-mile-thick ice covering Antarctica's Roosevelt Island. The cores, which could total 150,000 years of snowfall, almost didn't survive the boat ride to New Zealand because of a power outage.


Evidence from the last core her team hauled out needs further study, but it contains material that Bertler said appeared to be marine sediment that formed recently -- at least in geological terms measured in thousands of years.



The ice shelf acts as a natural barrier protecting massive amounts of ice in West Antarctica, and that ice also could fall into the ocean if the shelf fell apart. Scientists say West Antarctica holds enough ice to raise sea levels by between 6.5 feet and 20 feet if significant parts of it were to collapse.

Ted Scambos, the lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado, said that even under the worst-case scenario he thinks it would take at least 500 years for West Antarctica's ice to melt.


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