קראו את הקטע וענו על השאלות: הרי הקרח הזוכרים

Deep within the great ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica lies an archive of astonishing precision, written not in ink but in frozen water. As snow falls year after year and compresses into ice, it traps minuscule bubbles of ancient air, sealing away faithful samples of the atmosphere as it existed at the moment of burial. By drilling cores thousands of metres long and reading them like the pages of a book, scientists can reconstruct the planet’s climate across hundreds of thousands of years, layer by patient layer. The record they reveal is sobering. It shows that the concentration of certain gases now saturating our air stands well beyond anything experienced in the entire span the ice preserves, and that past shifts of comparable magnitude, though generally far slower than the change now underway, coincided with dramatic upheavals in sea level and living systems. There is a bitter irony worth pausing over. The very ice that so scrupulously records the history of our climate is itself among the first casualties of the warming it now documents, melting away and carrying its irreplaceable testimony with it. To lose these frozen archives before we have fully deciphered them would be to burn the only reliable account of where our atmosphere has been, and thus one of our surest guides to where, recklessly, it may be heading.

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