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And if there was a way to compare a sample of the Earth's atmosphere today with another dating back 800,000 years? This type of information could be very valuable for researchers studying climate change. Through a fascinating technique used at the University of Washington, it's a reality.
Each year, several UW researchers travel to distant lands around the world to collect ancient samples of our atmosphere from the Earth's ice sheets.
The best samples come from the oldest and hardest to reach ice creams, making Greenland and Antarctica excellent warehouses in the old atmosphere. When the snow fell to create what are today's ice sheets, the snow crystals covered small samples of the atmosphere of the time.
Pieces of the old earth 's atmosphere are trapped in air bubbles in harvested ice in Greenland.
Today, researchers can extract these tiny air bubbles by digging deep in the ice sheet.
Once brought back to the laboratory, a better understanding of the composition of the atmosphere of this period makes it possible to reconstruct the enigma of the transformation of the Earth's atmosphere over time.
RELATED: Arctic ice, considered the most stable, is breaking
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