What happened to the air in the ice in Antartica?

Question

What happened to the air in the ice in Antartica? I heard the ice deep in Antartica is very clear. Why doesn't it have little air bubbles like ice cubes? What happened to all that air?

Answer 1

Actually, it DOES have little bubbles in it. Over the great amount of time, the bubbles get compressed so they are VERY small. Scientists can sample the air in these bubbles to see what the composition of the atmosphere was millenia ago.

Antarctic ice (and glacial ice in general) DOESN'T have bubbles like ice cubes because it is made from compressed snow...ice cubes are made from liquid water that have air dissolved in it.

Answer 2

A lot of glaciers have blue ice at depth. A lot of the trapped air gets released during recrystallization of the ice as it gets compacted, and very small diffuse bubbles tend to join together to make fewer bubbles, minimizing the light scatter that bubbles produce (the reason that fresh ice is white appearing). There are still air bubbles in deep ice, and careful extraction of the air from these bubbles is used to learn about the chemistry of the atmosphere in prehistoric times.

There are even air bubbles in rocks (well, water and gas mix bubbles). This is why quartz in veins is often white, rather than clear as in a good crystal.

Answer 3

There is air in Antarctic ice and the bubbles can be seen in ice cores. The ice cores can be dated and the air trapped in the bubbles analysed to determine the composition of the atmosphere tens and hundreds of thousands of years ago.

Answer 4

The pressure of the ice and snow above it forces the air out.

Answer 5

The water in a refrigerator is cooled by colder air whereas the water deep below the surface of the Antarctic Ocean is cooled by colder water.
Water close to the surface of the Antarctic Ocean is cooled by colder air, so it forms aerated ice that floats above and below the water surface, like huge ice cubes in a glass of water, only we call them icebergs.