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Humans have been recording the weather for thousands of years. The Antarctic ice, however, has been in it for over a million years.
An international team of scientists has extracted a 1.74-mile-long (2.8-kilometer) ice core in Antarctica, striking the bedrock of the frozen continent. The core represents a chronological record of Earth’s climate and atmosphere, with the oldest ice dating back as far as 1.2 million years ago, if not longer. The success, announced in a statement from the project “Beyond EPICA – Oldest Ice”, is expected to provide insight into one of the most persistent questions of climate science.
It is worth clarifying that this record does not make it the oldest ice core ever mined – that recognition goes to a 2.7 million year old ice core recovered in 2017. What makes the Beyond EPICA core special is its continuous, high-resolution climate record spanning 1.2 million years, which offers crucial insights into ancient atmospheric conditions and glacial cycles.
“We have marked a historic moment for climate and environmental science,” said Carlo Barbante of Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, coordinator of Beyond EPICA. The heart was recovered during the project’s fourth Antarctic campaign. “This is the longest continuous record of our past climate from an ice core, and may reveal the interlink between the carbon cycle and the temperature of our planet.”
Between 900,000 and 1.2 million years ago, glacial cycles went from 41,000 years to 100,000 years—a change known as the Mid-Pleistocene Transition. The Beyond EPICA project aims to better understand this ancient climate phenomenon.
Led by the Institute of Polar Sciences of the National Research Council of Italy (ISP-CNR), the scientists worked for more than 200 days, drilling into the ice and transforming the ice core in a remote site in the East Antarctica called Little Dome C. with an average summer temperature of -31 degrees Fahrenheit (-35 degrees Celsius).
“From preliminary analyzes recorded at Little Dome C, we have a strong indication that the highest 2,480 meters (1.54 miles) contain a climate record that goes back 1.2 million years in a high-resolution record where up to 13,000 years are compressed into one. meter of ice,” said Julien Westhoff, a postdoc at the University of Copenhagen and the lead scientist in the field for the EPICA project.
The deepest and oldest parts of the core, which were closer to the rock, are made of ancient ice “that is very deformed, possibly mixed or cooled and of unknown origin”, as well as rocks from the rock itself. This section could deepen scientists’ understanding of the frozen ice beneath the Antarctic ice sheet, the glaciation history of this Antarctic region, and the last time the continent was ice-free.
The project still faces significant obstacles, especially the logistical challenge of transporting the segmented ice cores to a laboratory without the risk of melting.
“The precious ice cores extracted during this campaign will be transported to Europe aboard the Laura Bassi icebreaker, maintaining the cold chain at -50°C,” said Gianluca Bianchi Fasani, head of the Agenzia Nazionale Italiana The logistics of New Technologies, Energy, and Sustainable Economic Development (ENEA) for Beyond EPICA. “To achieve this goal, a strategy has been developed that involves the design of specialized cold containers and precise planning of the air and naval assets of the National Antarctic Research Program (PNRA).
Once the segmented ice core has found its way into a (very cold) laboratory, it remains to be seen what secrets researchers will unlock in the ancient climate record.
