Scientists studying climate have discovered that argon gas was present in the archaic Earth's atmosphere as a once primordial environment.
Scientists' efforts to know the changes in Earth's environment are relevant to understanding the mechanics of how the atmosphere evolves over millions of years. The present fluxing of our climate could be affected by the exact mechanisms that allowed argon to exist on ancient Earth.
Ice Cores Preserved Ancient Earth Atmosphere
Researchers working to create a model of evolving temperature variations and climatic shifts have found the ancient gas, reported the Science Daily.
Examination of samples that had the gas contained in air-hydrate crystals via ice cores; the study used this as a basis for it.
The stretch of immense ice sheets from Greenland to Antarctica has temperatures freezing that even a summer sun can't melt snow in these areas.
Snow buildup that the sun cannot melt causes air bubbles to be trapped in the freezing snow. Thousands of years passed, causing pressure and low temperatures that crystallize the primordial air to become crystals in layman's terms.
Air hydrate crystals are a natural record of how many shifts and changes from the time the gas was trapped. It is the most precise record of the past that Researchers can analyze.
New Methods To Extract Argon
Developing new ways to measure more than a couple of elements has come about; scientists have learned to detect more than oxygen and nitrogen.
Detecting trace of argon gas should add more variables on how it was relevant in prior ages of the Earth's history and its archaic earth atmosphere. This study involving argon gas in air-hydrate crystals is cited in ENN.
According to the first author, Tsutomu Uchida from Hokkaido University, the only known paleoenvironmental repository of an authentic ancient atmosphere with a time axis in the depth direction is air bubbles inside an ice core. He mentions it was able to extract argon gas from ice by melting or cutting it, but its exact place in the undisturbed ice remained unclear.
Knowing where ancient gas is located in an ice sample will improve how the mechanics of gas molecules in ice move will be a help. Another point is that it could give data for an environmental model for reconstruction, noted Quicktelecast.
Five air-hydrate crystals were studied and investigated inside an ice core recovered from Greenland, which contains ice dating back to around 130,000 years ago.
Several methods used were a combination of scanning electron microscopy and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy enabling visualization and identifying the gas molecules trapped in the crystallize air; argon gas was seen.
Kumiko Goto-Azuma, a co-author, said that the gas is assumed to be in crystallized air, through microscopic analysis is yet to be done. He cautioned that there might be an error due to the rareness of ancient argon gas with other elements; it is an inert gas that people cannot measure like nitrogen and oxygen.
The process needs to be improved by the study members to understand better how the gas is distributed in ice; to know the exact mechanism in nature.
Finding argon gas trapped in the crystallize air from the archaic Earth's atmosphere is a good step forward to knowing how climate change and its mechanisms occur.
Related Article: Earth's Sudden Oxygenation Is Purely Accidental After Several Billion Years, New Theory Explains
