Antarctic Ocean secrets hidden in layers of seafloor mud

Why wouldn’t any person do hand -numb cold, icy winds and rough seas – sometimes working through the night – to dig the mud from the Antarctic seabed?

This is what was exclusively done by an international team of adventurous researchers in the remote Antarctic Peninsula earlier this year, on a mission, which was on a mission with the aim of revealing centuries of scientific secrets about the southern Ocean.

Scientists around the world will now share these precious soil samples and analyze them that human activity – including a century of industrial whaling – Antarctica and the rest of our planet.

Research is part of a global effort to understand the relationship between the ocean and the climate.

Researchers used a special koring drill – a huge apple -corner little – for a research ship, to drill at a depth of up to 500 meters.

They collected more than 40 long core of seaflore sediment, or tubes from the places around the peninsula.

It is one of the richest houses for maritime life in Antarctica, and fishing, a focal point for tourism and – before being banned in the 1980s – industrial whale hunting.

The collection of sedes provides insight and clues to the past, “Like History of History”, Dr. of the University of Barcelona. Explained to Elisenda Balsaye.

He said, “Now what is living in the sea, what was living in the seas in the past and our human impact evidence” has been recorded in the layer of sediment for centuries.

By analyzing those layers, and by analyzing what they have, researchers can create a picture of the Antarctic marine life history.

Once on the ship, the core is frozen and Barcelona and Dr. Ballest’s laboratory was taken.

From there, careful extracted pieces of this Antarctic mud will be sent to many educational institutions around the world.

Scientists will scan and date the sedimentary layers, find out which microbial life they are in, measure the level of pollution and calculate how much carbon is buried in the mud.

This is part of a mission – Convex siscape survey – Universities and research institutes around the world have been working together to understand how our oceans and climate are connected.

Claire Ellen, an osteraographer at the British Antarctic survey, who has studied the past of Antarctica for more than 20 years, stated that the core like these was particularly valuable.

“Before 1950 – before any monitoring capacity of any kind in Antarctica – sediment core and ice core is the only way we can achieve insight into any climate or physical properties that have changed over time,” he said.

The newly collected samples being stored for DNA analysis should be kept at sufficient temperatures to prevent all biological processes.

Dr. Balsaye excluded him from an industrial -sized freezer, where he is being stored to show us, very briefly.

“Minus is placed at 80 degrees to degrade them,” he explained.

These small pieces of seabed – frozen in time at temperature preserving genetic material – is known as environmental DNA analysis.

It is a field of science that has developed rapidly in recent years. This gives researchers the ability to extract genetic information from water, soil and even air, such as a fingerprint of life left behind in the environment.

Dr. of King Abdullah University in Saudi Arabia. Carlos Precler, leading this part of the research and trying to measure how almost a century industrial whaling in Antarctica affected the sea and our atmosphere.

Carbon – when it is released into the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide – heats our planet like a blanket.

Therefore, as the world struggles to reduce those emissions, any process that absorbs and locks the vital amount of carbon can help curb global warming.

“We know that there is a lot of carbon in the whale’s body, because they are huge animals,” Dr. Prikler said.

He and his colleagues want to know how much that carbon is buried in seaflor – and closes away from the atmosphere – when the animals die.

“We can measure whale DNA and carbon in sediment,” Dr. Precler explained.

“So we can measure what happened before industrial whaling, in which most whales were removed [Southern] Ocean, “he said.

Researchers say, how much whale – just remove carbon from our environment and help in fighting against climate change.