Cosmic dust in terrestrial ice

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The antarctic ice cap ia a perfect archive for precipitation and dust particles. Therefore even with blue sky you find precipitation of ice particles at Kohnen station in Antartica which can build a halo. Besides terrestrical mineral dust also extrat ...
The antarctic ice cap ia a perfect archive for precipitation and dust particles. Therefore even with blue sky you find precipitation of ice particles at Kohnen station in Antartica which can build a halo. Besides terrestrical mineral dust also extraterrestrical dust is deposed. On the top left a extraterrestrical dust particle of a few micrometers size is installed. Credit: Johannes Freitag & Hubertus Fischer, Alfred Wegener Institute

For the last 30,000 years, our planet has been hit by a constant rain of cosmic dust particles. Scientists have reached this conclusion after investigating the amount of the helium isotope 3He in cosmic dust particles preserved in an Antarctic ice core.


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