Little Dome C - At the Little Dome C camp in Antarctica, a research team composed of twelve scientific institutions from ten European countries has achieved a historic milestone in climate science. The decisive drilling campaign of the European project Beyond EPICA – Oldest Ice has reached a depth of 2,800 meters, where the Antarctic ice sheet meets the underlying bedrock. The ice extracted holds an unparalleled archive of Earth's climate history, providing direct information on atmospheric temperatures and greenhouse gas concentrations over the past 1.2 million years—and possibly beyond.

“From the preliminary analyses conducted at the site, we have strong indications that the first 2,480 meters of ice contain a climate record dating back 1.2 million years, with data compressed into just one meter of ice representing 13,000 years of climate history,” says Julien Westhoff, field scientific leader and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Copenhagen. Beneath the ice containing the climate record spanning more than 1.12 million years, the final 210 meters of the ice core consist of very ancient and highly deformed ice, likely mixed or refrozen, of unknown origin. Advanced analyses could help test previous theories about the behavior of refrozen ice under the Antarctic ice sheet, unveiling the glaciation history of East Antarctica, one of the project’s main objectives.

The ice cores from the Beyond EPICA project will provide unprecedented insights into the Mid-Pleistocene Transition, a period between 900,000 and 1.2 million years ago when glacial cycles slowed from 41,000-year intervals to 100,000-year intervals. The reasons for this change remain one of the most complex mysteries in climate science, which this project aims to resolve.

“The precious ice cores extracted during this campaign will be transported to Europe aboard the icebreaker Laura Bassi, maintaining the cold chain at -50°C—a significant logistical challenge for the project,” says Gianluca Bianchi Fasani, senior researcher at ENEA-UTA and logistics manager for Beyond EPICA. Once these ice cores arrive in Europe, the project will focus on analyzing the samples to unveil the Earth’s climatic and atmospheric history over the past 1.5 million years.