Forty-year-old air sample found

A man in Beaumaris, Australia provided scientists with the oldest sample of air from the southern hemisphere. John Allport, 76, gave a scuba tank that he had filled in 1968 to researchers from the CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research labs. From Nature:

The air archive maintained by CSIRO started in 1978, and contains samples of clean air from a station at Cape Grim, Tasmania. It’s the oldest such archive in the world. Now with Allport’s tank, last used in 1970, the record has been extended further.

The air contained traces of propellants, refrigerants and emissions form aluminium smelters. Paul Fraser, who leads CSIRO’s greenhouse gas research team says that the scuba tank is going to be really useful: “If tanks were filled in a clean coastal environment their usefulness in measuring greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and chloro-flurocarbons (CFCs) is much broader,” he says.

"Old air discovered"

• [Anonymous]

  I’d be interested if the air was from the 50s or 60s.

• [Anonymous]

  I have a collection of very carefully bottled and sealed flatulence, circa late 1970s. Complete data of multiple environmental factors possible. A true find, or just hot air? In depth analysis could provide explosive results. On demand delivery.

• [Anonymous]

  Not a lot of scuba divers commenting, eh? SCUBA air isn’t filtered for carbon monoxide, and the air intake is generally as far away from the compressor exhaust as possible (or use an electrical one). Clearly, you don’t want to start a dive and breathe a bunch of exhaust, but why bother filtering it out when you have a supply of perfectly breathable atmosphere all around in areas where the exhaust isn’t.

  At any rate, I doubt any scientist is going to drastically change their views on all their other data because of one data point, whether or not it has higher or lower co2 than ice cores. It’s still interesting though.

• [MrsBug]

  I know this is scientifically interesting and useful, but boy does it sound weird. It’s like saying, “oldest dirt discovered.” LOL

• [ZDepthCharge]

  Maude did it first.

• [Church]

  How do you fill a scuba tank without being in an environment that is inherently compromised? An electric pump, maybe?

• [Chris Spurgeon]

  Can you trust samples like that? I mean what if a bus was belching exhaust by the scuba shop when the tank was filled? Or the tank filler was wearing some sort of nasty VOC emitting cologne or something? Or there was a leaky refrigerator in the scuba shop?

• [Robert]

  Ha. Back in 1975, I stored an air sample and marked on it “Air from 1975. Do not open until 2025″.

  Of course, the air was stored in a small cardboard box sealed with clear tape. What did I know?

• [jfrancis]

  Sometimes sealed telescopes or hour glasses from centuries ago turn up

• [Anonymous]

  i thought the oldest air was nearly a million years old and is trapped in tiny bubbles deep in the antarctic ice?

• [rob ray]

  It seems they’ve never heard of Marcel Duchamp?

  “50 cc of Paris Air” from 1919
  http://www.toutfait.com/unmaking_the_museum/Paris%20Air.html

• [Anonymous]

  The smile on the guys face makes me think he remembers all too well the bean burrito he ate the night before filling the tank (and of course the resulting ‘forceful’ results). Maybe that’s why he never used up the tank?

• [Anonymous]

  i think that the fact that this air is compressed, which means there is much more of it in thereto be tested than what would naturally occur in ice bubbles, or whatever may have been made and sealed long ago that was at standard atmospheric pressure.

• [David Pescovitz]

  @Rob Ray, Ha!!! I had forgotten about that piece. Nice.

• [Phikus]

  On Tom Waits’ latest live release (Boinged, btw, but I’m too lazy to link it) he says he made an ebay purchase of Henry Ford’s dying breath. I can’t help but be reminded of that, seeing this post.

• [Mitch]

  I would think that there would be contaminants from the compressor in there somewhere. When examining this air artifacts from the process of filling tank are going to be taken into account, correct?

• [Anonymous]

  I wonder, how they can eliminate contamination from outgassing of the parts/debris inside the tank? Does this effect ice-bubble-trapped air samples too?

• [Anonymous]

  @rob ray: last I heard, France wasn’t in the southern hemisphere ;)

• [ncm]

  I have a ten year old, continuously refrigerated plastic bottle of flax seed oil, available free to any serious researcher.

  • [Anonymous]

    Ooook, I don’t think that will be of any use to anyone.

• [Snig]

  I’d be kind of surprised if there weren’t some industrial process or manufactured item that didn’t accidentally do this. Christmas ornaments, or concrete or old rubber chickens or somesuch where pockets of old air could be obtained.

• [wmperry]

  What about the fact that air intended for SCUBA has been filtered to remove carbon monoxide and other pollutants that would become toxic at depth? Even back in 1970 they knew enough to do that. Seems like that would make this sample pretty useless.

• [Anonymous]

  Sometimes unexpected scientific gems like this are found. My favorite was the stereo-optic landscape pictures taken a long time ago (75? 100? years) by a photographer that was totally fanatic about keeping super accurate notes about exact location, facing, angles, time, etc of every photo. It was so good, they could exactly duplicate his picture expedition and analyze the results for topological changes.
  One small note about the air tanks. They can compensate for the tank and compressor since they know about it.

• [Anonymous]

  You all are getting it backwards. Scuba tanks and fill equipment are specifically designed to provide clean air. The reason they know a school bus didn’t drive by or the tank didn’t contaminate the air is because there are safeguards to prevent that. Fact is, the air is cleaner through filtering that occurs when the tank is filled. If it weren’t, the air would sicken or kill the diver at depth.

• [Anonymous]

  The air I get is from Druidia. But I can’t seem to find the pass code though…