Testing Ice Cores

We've been looking at evidence which scientists can use to find out about how the atmosphere has changed over the past 15 thousand years. One important method is to drill into the deep ice in the Arctic or Antarctic and pull out an 'ice core'. This can be cut into slices, where the slices from deeper down are older.

In our practical we used Universal Indicator (green in neutral solutions, red in strongly acidic solutions and yellow in weakly acidic solutions) to work out how much 'Carbon Dioxide Remover' needed to be added to a melted ice core before all the CO2 was removed. Here are some pictures of the class at work:

The equipment you can see in the photos includes beakers, graduated pipettes (these have a scale on them allowing you to work out the volume of the solution added) and the Universal Indicator in a small bottle.