Special, very ancient carrots are arriving, which are also time capsules. No, they are not eaten, but they will be studied: the European researchers of the Beyond EPICA – Oldest Ice project, coordinated by the Institute of Polar Sciences of the National Research Council (Cnr-Ips) have in fact extracted ice cores in Antarctica at a depth of 2800 meters, a record. Which is not needed to enter the Guinness Book of Records, but rather to study the past climate and the concentrations of greenhouse gases over a million years ago and a half years.
Gianluca Fasani, researcher at ENEA-UTA and logistics manager for Beyond EPICA explains that these very precious cores (the most expensive cores in the world are made of ice, who would have thought) will arrive in Europe to be analyzed by the various laboratories on the icebreaker Laura Bassi, maintaining the temperature at minus fifty degrees Celsius with the use of special refrigerator containers. In short, a not at all trivial undertaking to find a truly EPIC carrot.
From which we will be able to better understand how much human activity has influenced the climate, especially the most recent one, a million and a half years ago we didn’t even exist as a species, and the various hominids polluted little.
Indeed, while today we fight global warming caused by us, our ancestors in the Pleistocene had to deal with the last great glaciation (the Würm glaciation, which lasted between one hundred and eleven thousand and twelve thousand years ago), and it’s not like they could do much about it . In any case, let’s wait for the outcome of the carrots.