AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
A group of scientists in Antarctica have discovered something prehistoric in the ice.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE THING")
KURT RUSSELL: (As R.J. MacReady) How long you figure this has been in the ice?
CHARLES HALLAHAN: (As Norris) I'd say the ice this is buried in is 100,000-years-old, at least.
RASCOE: OK, OK, so it wasn't a giant spaceship like in John Carpenter's science-fiction horror "The Thing." And it wasn't a woolly mammoth or a dinosaur either. It was bubbles, bubbles that are frozen in what's probably the oldest ice ever excavated, up to 1.2 million-years-old. Researchers hope that it could tell us about climate change and our early ancestors. Carlo Barbante coordinated the discovery. He's a professor of analytical chemistry at Ca' Forscari University of Venice, and he joins us now. Thank you for being here.
CARLO BARBANTE: Yeah, thank you, and good morning. Good day, everybody.
RASCOE: OK, so I have to start with the temperature. Just how cold was it where you were working?
BARBANTE: Well, during summertime, it means we are in the Southern Hemisphere. So from December to January, the average temperature is about minus 35.
RASCOE: What made you decide to go digging down in the ice in the first place?
BARBANTE: We came out of a previous project, which is a European project in Antarctica, that the law has to record the climate over the last 800,000 years. But we wanted to go farther back in time, and that's the reason why we spent so much time to search for a place where we could have all this ice. And the point is that we were looking at the continuous record, you know, because we know that there are ice which is even older than 1.2 million years. We have places which is even 3 or 4 million years, but it's not a continuous record. It's just on spots, so it's not really what we need to explain processes happening into the climate system.
RASCOE: Well, so talk to me about that. What can bubbles, of all things, like, bubbles in the ice, teach us about climate?
BARBANTE: It's not just bubbles which are entrapped into the ice. And so when you go deeper and deeper and you look at carefully at this ice core, which are cylinder of ice of about 10 centimeters or 4 inches in diameter, you can see these little tiny bubbles that are less than 1 millimeter thick. Well, those entrap the air of hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousand years ago. So when we do analyze the air, we can see what our ancestors, for instance, breathe a long time ago.
RASCOE: So you found something in the ice. It seemed like there weren't a lot of human beings left at a certain point.
BARBANTE: Well, this period of time, around 900,000 years ago, is extremely important for climate science. And incidentally, a year ago, there was a publication in science that told us, during that period of time, there was a bottleneck in the evolution of human beings, and about 1,300 individuals were left in the world planet. So whether this is linked to the climate change or to something else, we don't know. But it's strange coincidence. We hope that we will have some more information also from other climatic records.
RASCOE: Is that good for human beings, to find out why we had gotten so low in population and what that might mean for the future?
BARBANTE: It is an open question. I mean, we know that things happen, and then they might re-happen again. So it's good to know how evolution of human beings went on and also how climate follow during that period of time.
RASCOE: That's Professor Carlo Barbante. He is the director of the Institute of Polar Sciences at Ca' Forscari University of Venice. Thank you so much for talking with me.
BARBANTE: Thank you very much. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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