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Forty years of ice-core records of CO2

In 1980, a method was found to determine the amount of carbon dioxide in ancient air trapped in polar ice — providing direct evidence that CO2 is coupled to climate, and affects global temperatures in the past, present and future.
  1. Jean-Robert Petit

    1. Jean-Robert Petit is at the University of Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, IRD, INP, IGE, F-38000 Grenoble, France.

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  2. Dominique Raynaud

    1. Dominique Raynaud is at the University of Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, IRD, INP, IGE, F-38000 Grenoble, France.

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In the ancient ice sheets near Earth’s poles, tiny bubbles trapped in the compacted layers of snowfall provide a natural archive of air from ages past, but one that is not straightforward to read. Forty years ago, the glaciologist Robert Delmas and colleagues developed a technique for reliably measuring the amount of carbon dioxide in the bubbles1. Their work paved the way for modern measurements showing that atmospheric CO2 levels have been linked to Earth’s temperature for hundreds of thousands of years.

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Nature 579, 505-506 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-00809-8

Updates & Corrections

  • Correction 26 March 2020: An earlier version of this article incorrectly credited the image in Figure 1. The correct credit is Vladimir Lipenkov.

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