The Volcano That Changed The World Read Online Free PDF Page A

looked thoughtfully around the old and worn auditorium. He had been an undergraduate here and the room triggered many fond memories. Coming back as an assistant professor after receiving his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois had been a crowning achievement. If Bolton were successful in ending his FSU career, he would miss this place and the students—especially the students.
     

Chapter Two
     
    Whereas non-scientific (and potentially dangerous) thinking starts with a premise and then looks for things that support it, scientific thinking constantly tries to disprove itself. That alone makes all the difference in the world.
    — Derren Brown
     
    Ice Core Laboratory, FSU, May 1998
     
    On the west side of the Carraway Building was the one-story annex called the Antarctic Marine Geology Research Facility, or AMGRF. The AMGRF was the only truly modern portion of the building. This architectural anomaly housed a premier collection of Antarctic ice and sediment cores as well as a smaller assortment of similar cores from Greenland. The facility was established in 1963 and funded since by the NSF.
                  Due to the priceless nature of these ice cores, tight security was in effect. To obtain access, authorized personnel typed the proper code into keypads adjacent to entry doors. Two chambers were inside. The outer chamber held the sediment cores in row after row of mobile shelving, all properly labeled indicating the location where the core was collected and its depth.
    In t he center of this outer compartment, a second inner chamber, also with keypad-controlled entry, stored the ice cores in the same fashion. Whereas the sediment core chamber was refrigerated, the inner ice core compartment was a freezer, keeping the ice well below the freezing point of water. Because of the power requirements for refrigeration, the AMGRF had massive backup generators to ensure continuous electricity.
                  Work areas within each chamber at the FSU lab were supplied with cutting tools to make thin sections, or samples of the cores, microscopes to view the sections, and other scientific instruments. Because of the risk of frostbite and hypothermia, working in these areas required proper clothing, such as heavy coats designed for extreme winter weather.
    Activities within the inner chamber were restricted to two-hour intervals, followed by a mandatory break of at least thirty minutes. Upon entry, researchers set a timer that alerted them to when their two-hour period was up. This rarely happened, as discrete tasks were often completed in less than two hours.
    The ice cores were each about six feet in length and four inches in diameter. They had been carefully transported to FSU in a refrigerated container after having been drilled and recovered from ice sheets in Antarctica or Greenland.
    In those respective locations , year after year, snow would fall on the ice sheets, building up and compressing deeper, older snow into ice. The porous snowflakes captured material contained in the lower atmosphere as they fell to earth. These so-called “inclusions” could consist of bubbles of atmospheric gas, wind-blown dust and ash, or even radioactive substances that could each tell their own story about precipitation, temperature, solar activity, chemistry and gas composition of the lower atmosphere, volcanic eruptions, sea-surface biological productivity, and even forest fires.
    With time and more sn ow, the older flakes were buried and compressed, forming additional ice and preserving Mother Nature’s diary of these events. With each year’s layer of snow, a new page was added to her diary; scientists called each layer a “cycle.” Each vertical core sample captured a cross-section of these cycles as horizontal layers of ice. The frozen tubes of ice were thus an invaluable, uninterrupted, detailed climate record extending back thousands of years. From the cores, one could learn about the earth’s climate