https://hakaimagazine.com/features/the-coolest-library-on-earth/
"In a narrow aisle of shelves packed with cardboard boxes, Jørgen Peder
Steffensen grins like a mischievous child unwrapping a holiday present as he
pulls out a plastic-wrapped hunk of ice from a box marked Keep Frozen.
The bag of ice contains the transition from 1 BCE to 1 CE, he says. “That means
we have the real Christmas snow.”
This piece of ice, a bit longer than his arm, doesn’t visibly look different
from modern ice. Yet bubbles trapped in it preserve the chemistry of the air in
Greenland from more than two millennia ago. “But we can’t find any traces of
reindeer, or magical dust,” Steffensen quips.
In this freezer facility in Denmark, Steffensen’s team at the Niels Bohr
Institute at the University of Copenhagen stores some 40,000 segments of ice
cores, long cylinders of ice from polar regions that preserve the history of
past climate. Beyond cataloging frozen treasures, Steffensen collaborates on
research that chisels out historical secrets hidden in ice, and runs logistics
for an international drilling project in Greenland to retrieve even more
deep-core samples.
Copenhagen is one of several places in the world where pieces of ice cores
drilled from our planet’s extremities are kept safely cold. Other large
research freezers are located in the United States, Australia, France, Italy,
Germany, Russia, and Japan. According to Steffensen, Copenhagen has the most
samples from the world’s deepest cores, amounting to 15.5 kilometers of ice.
That’s about the distance from Steffensen’s laboratory in central Copenhagen to
this unassuming yellow-tiled warehouse in an industrial park, where the ice
archive has been housed since 2019. Both the lab and the freezer spaces are
temporary, awaiting the completion of a massive construction project for a new
university facility. The archive also keeps an additional five kilometers of
ice from shorter cores drilled in Greenland, Antarctica, Iceland, Patagonia,
and a glacier in a Slovakian cave. Some ice samples came from initiatives with
strong Danish involvement, while others came from researchers abroad looking
for a chilled home.
Ice cores serve as important historical records for scientists interested in
how our planet’s climate has changed, whether in the distant past or more
recently. Like tree rings, layers of snow that fell and formed these cores can
be counted and correlated to years in the past. In a core drilled from a place
that sees minimal melting, “all those annual layers of snowfall are just in one
undisturbed sequence back in time,” Steffensen says. “The deeper you go, the
farther back in time you go.”"
Via Esther Schindler, who wrote "Sure, all libraries are cool, but this one is
literally the coolest."
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
