• Question: what kind of things do you find while you are digging?

    Asked by helinyucetas19 to Tamsin on 15 Mar 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Tamsin Gray

      Tamsin Gray answered on 15 Mar 2010:

      I dig for lots of reasons. I have to dig snow to melt to make water to drink. I also have to dig up snow mobiles, tents and weather stations that get buried in the snow. Sometimes I find barrels of fuel for an aeroplane when I dig!

      Sometimes scientists here need to dig so deep that they have to use a special drill instead of a shovel. They can go down hundreds or thousands of metres. As they dig, they go back in time – the deeper you go, the older the snow. They find little bubbles of air that get trapped in the snow as it falls and they can use this to find out what the climate was like hundreds and thousands of years ago compared to today.

Comments