Camera dropped into hole 305 feet beneath Antarctica makes incredible discovery
Topics: Science, Nature, Environment, Climate Change, Antarctica
Callum Jones
Featured Image Credit: Storyful
Topics: Science, Nature, Environment, Climate Change, Antarctica
When you think we've discovered everything there is to know about our planet, something new crops up.
And while we continue to push the fight on learning more about outer space, there is so much about Earth that we still don't know.
Well, a recent incident came of particular interest to many, as a camera dropped into a hole 305 feet beneath Antarctica to make an incredible discovery.
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Geological history can be examined by looking into ice sheets that have been around for an unknowable amount of time.
Some ice melts and reforms each year, but there are near-permanent sheets that are hundreds of meters deep and haven't melted for centuries.
As a result, they hold plenty of frozen information.
Well, a viral TikTok video has shed some light on this, and the results are quite interesting.
The video from Austin. a researcher who worked with the Center for Old Ice Exploration (COLDEX) to look into some Antarctic ice sheets in 2022, begins with an action camera being dropped down one of the deep bore holes that COLDEX uses to extract samples from the ice.
The camera was let loose 93 metres to the bottom, giving us a surprisingly trippy icy journey.
It's quite an amazing video, starting with Carter at ground level waving goodbye to the camera before it speeds down the small hole.
It doesn't take long for things to lose their sense of scale, with the vertical icy tunnel almost starting to look a bit otherworldly.
It looks a little like speeding through an incredibly narrow tunnel on a train, or even being on a bobsled, and people have been pretty amazed by it.
Many have since flocked to the comments section of the TikTok video to provide their thoughts.
"Honestly this was really scary," one person commented while a second asked: "Much respect, and pls take no offence, but why? Why spend time and money for a study on old ice?"
COLDEX and similar research teams can learn a lot about our ancient history by studying the ice at these depths - particularly where the climate is concerned.
Samples from different depths can help us to glean information about long historical patterns of warming or cooling.
And with the climate crisis still a hot topic of conversation, all this research may being able to better predict the effect of global warming on the planet, including what it might do to those very same ice sheets.