Historic drilling project finds ice over 1.2 million years old
The fourth Antarctic campaign of the Beyond EPICA-Oldest Ice project has achieved a historic milestone this week, by successfully drilling a 2800-metre-long ice core, consisting of ice from the Antarctic ice sheet which is more than 1.2 million years old.
Funded by the European Commission and coordinated by the Institute of Polar Sciences of the CNR (National Research Council of Italy), the drilling campaign was conducted at the remote ‘Little Dome C’ site by an international team of researchers. With scientists representing twelve scientific institutions from ten European nations, the project is collecting these ice samples in the hope of unveiling, for the first time, a continuous record of Earth’s climate and atmospheric past stretching back 1.2 million years, and potentially beyond.
The extracted ice core harbours data such as historical atmospheric temperatures, as well as incredibly preserved samples of air – and the greenhouse gases within it – spanning thousands of years. Both, along with other information locked away in the samples, will aid scientists to paint a more detailed image of the Earth’s past, and hopefully reveal critical details about large shifts in our planet’s past climate record.
