Climate scientists hoping to unlock the secrets of a 1.5-million-year-old ice core soon to be recovered from Antarctica have a new tool at their disposal. The Department of Environmental Sciences at Ca’Foscari University of Venice has recently assembled a new state-of-the-art LA-ICP-MS setup dedicated to ice core analysis.
Ice core science is one of the cornerstones of climate research that aims to gain a fuller picture of what our planet looked like from decades to hundreds of millennia ago. Due to the flow of glacier ice, the oldest, deepest layers of ice are also often the thinnest. Unlocking the data contained in these thin layers is a challenge requiring new high-resolution techniques.
