image: Working on the deep drill for the second Dome Fuji ice core. In this picture, the 'core barrel' (or inner barrel) containing ice core is just pulled out from the outer barrel. The green spiral on the core barrel, when the drill rotates, transports ice chips generated at the cutting surface (at the bottom of the borehole) upwards into a "chip chamber" located above the core barrel. This material relates to a paper that appeared in the Feb. 8, 2017, issue of Science Advances, published by AAAS. The paper, by K. Kawamura at National Institute of Polar Research in Tokyo, Japan, and colleagues was titled, 'State dependence of climatic instability over the past 720,000 years from Antarctic ice cores and climate modeling.' view more
Credit: [Credit: National Institute of Polar Research, Research Organization of Information and Systems, Tokyo, Japan]