How Maori Arrival in New Zealand Was Frozen in Antarctic Ice

Ice cores drilled from the southern continent preserved a signal of the peopling of islands thousands of miles away.

By Katherine Kornei

When it comes to records of human history, don’t overlook Earth’s only uninhabited continent.

Researchers recently found soot preserved in Antarctic ice that they’ve linked to fires set in New Zealand by Māori settlers, the islands’ first human inhabitants. Finding evidence of conflagrations thousands of miles away is a dramatic example of early humanity’s environmental impact, the team suggests.

These results were published Wednesday in Nature.

Since the 1960s, researchers have been extracting long cores of ice from Antarctica, Greenland and other snowy locales. Ice cores, which are made up of layers of snow that accumulated annually and were compressed over time, consist of more than just ice, however. They can also contain particulate matter like soot and volcanic ash that was once airborne.

“Ice cores are actually telling you what fell out of the sky,” said Joseph McConnell, an environmental scientist at the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nev.

By studying particulate matter in ice cores, scientists can pinpoint past events such as major fires, volcanic eruptions, and even industrial smelting.

In 2008, Dr. McConnell and his colleagues began analyzing six ice cores drilled in Antarctica. Working with roughly three-foot-long sections of ice at a time, the team melted each one and fed the resulting liquid into an instrument that turned it into aerosols. The researchers then passed those aerosol particles through a laser that caused any soot present to heat up and glow.

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