Antarctic time capsules reveal climate secrets from 800,000BC

  Scientists are preparing to study tiny bubbles of air trapped inside
  the Antarctic ice sheet for more than 800,000 years as part of an
  ambitious research programme to investigate the history of the Earth's
  climate using the frozen time capsules of the north and south poles.

  The air bubbles will provide critical information on temperature and
  atmospheric composition at the time when the ice formed. The findings

  Professor Heinz Miller, a researcher at the Alfred Wegener Institute in
  Bremmerhaven, Germany, and spokesman for the European Project for Ice
  Coring in Antarctica (Epica), said that the drill still had another 100
  metres to go before it hits the bedrock. When completed, the project 
  should be bringing ice more than a million years old to the surface, he
  said. "We need to learn from the past. We need to learn from our climate
  history. Ice cores tell us about temperature, precipitation and 
  atmospheric composition at a time long ago," he said. The ice had shown,
  for instance, that the world was 20C cooler 11,000 years ago.

  Similar ice cores taken from the Greenland ice sheet have shown that the
  Earth has experienced rapid periods of warming and cooling, where average
  global temperatures have changed by as much as 10C in less than 30
  years.

  "That's very fast even by human standards," said Professor Nicholas
  Shackleton of Cambridge University, who is comparing the ice core data 
  with another set of findings from cores drilled into the muddy sediments
  on the seabed of the North Atlantic.

  By Steve Connor, Science Editor
  03 March 2003
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/environment/story.jsp?story=383314
  -----------------------------------

              FURTHER REFERENCES

  GO - "search perceptions" - in SEARCH-ENGINE


file-ID www.perceptions.couk.com/coldagin.txt