What scientists do in Antarctica?

Today i watched first episode of Pole to Pole with Will Smith, and in this series he is going to travel from South Pole to North Pole.

Before reaching to geographical south pole, he visited Criosphere 1, where three Brazilians do research work. That’s a tough place to be, since temperature there around -35C and this is a real desert.

Interesting fact, that desert doesn’t mean sand and sun, what we usually imagine when we say that. Desert means very dry place and Antarctica is one of the driest places in the world.

Back to Criosphere 1. Each gases which are physically produced are reaching Antarctica and they frozen as a bubbles in ice. So by analyzing these bubbles, they can find when people start massively use coalcoal for heating, or when we start to fertilize the field or when first nuclear bomb was dropped. So it is like a history book and it stores information for millions of years. It is not so straightforward to find that ice with very old information, so they are keep trying to find it. Based on the data, they can analyze how the world has changed and use extrapolation to predict future trends.

One guy work there already 35 years and this is insane, how strong you need to be and how much you need to love your job. But this is cool, because he is doing a job which can help everyone to better understand our planet. And there are still a lot of questions and unknowns.