Antarctic ice cores like a time capsulepreserving small pockets of ancient air from the distant past. In a remarkable logistical feat, European researchers extracted data from a 1.7-mile (2.8-kilometer) ice core—a colossal sample of 1.2 million years of Earth’s history.
Recently statementThe Beyond EPICA–Oldest Ice project has announced the completion of its latest Antarctic campaign, which successfully obtained what appears to be the longest continuous record of Earth’s climate as captured inside an ice core. Experts from 14 laboratories from 10 European countries participated in this project It started in late 2019. Drilling was completed in 2025, but the last ice core samples (broken into smaller, manageable pieces) arrived at European laboratories only last month. British Antarctic Survey (BAS) participated in the project.
“We faced unprecedented technological and engineering challenges in Antarctic glaciology; success was not certain,” project coordinator Carlo Barbante said in a statement. “We have achieved a historic result: we have allowed science to turn the pages of the oldest history book, that is, we have analyzed the ice formed over the last 1.2 million years.”
Looking at the ice
The Beyond EPICA collaboration is the official successor to the European Project for Ice Exploration in Antarctica (EPICA). It started in 1996. A previous project was drilled and successfully completed at Dome C in southeast Antarctica It revealed a climate history of up to 800,000 yearsBAS explained.
EPICA’s successor wanted to go further back in time, using it to describe ice cores. Middle Pleistocene transition. During this period, Earth’s climate experienced drastic changes during the interglacial and glacial periods, the exact reasons for which are still unknown.
“It is believed that greenhouse gases played a smaller role before the transition than after, but what caused the change is not well defined,” Barbante said. Nature news. “So we need a record from which we can extract both gas concentrations and temperatures.”
Barren lands
Ice cores are simply a unique, direct source of information about the atmosphere at different times in Earth’s history, say Huang Yu and Janani Venkatesh, two PhD students at the University of Cambridge in the UK. blog post. Yu and Venkatesh, who were involved in the analysis of the ice cores from Beyond EPICA, added that in very cold places like Antarctica, snowfall eventually compresses to form ice. This process also traps atmospheric air between the ice crystals in tiny bubbles.
Although ice cores are very valuable, collecting or analyzing them is not an easy task. First, researchers in Antarctica had to work for two months in an average temperature of -31 degrees Fahrenheit (-35 degrees Celsius) to drill a mile deep into the thick ice and make sure they were drilling the right layer, according to a statement from the collaboration.
Back in the lab, the researchers melted a stick of ice and separated the specific membrane gas components into instruments for further analysis. Yu and Venkatesh noted that “nothing goes to waste” as everything from particulate dust to melt water is collected to get as much information as possible.
In this sense, from a logistical point of view, the achievements of the project are truly impressive. Now that the drilling is done, scientists will be working hard to extract information hidden deep within the samples.
