Blurs

When most people think of archaeology, they imagine buried cities, ancient temples or long-forgotten tombs.  Antarctica, a frozen continent covered by kilometres of ice, seems an unlikely place for archaeological discovery. Yet some of the most important clues about humanity's past—and the history of our planet—are being uncovered not from ruins, but from deep within Antarctica's ancient ice. These frozen archives contain a remarkable record stretching back hundreds of thousands of years.  By drilling deep into the Antarctic ice sheet and extracting cylindrical samples known as ice cores, scientists can effectively travel backwards through time, examining atmospheric conditions, volcanic eruptions and climate changes that occurred long before written history began. While not archaeology in the traditional sense, ice-core research functions as a form of planetary archaeology, revealing a hidden record of Earth's past preserved in layer upon layer of ancient ice. Nature's...