On January 9, 2025, a research team comprising twelve scientific institutions from ten European countries reached a significant milestone in climate science at Little Dome C in Antarctica. The decisive drilling campaign of the European project Beyond EPICA - Oldest Ice reached a depth of 2,800 meters, where the Antarctic ice sheet meets the underlying rock. The extracted ice preserves an unparalleled archive of Earth's climate history, providing direct insights into atmospheric temperatures and greenhouse gas concentrations over the past 1.2 million years and possibly beyond.
Carlo Barbante, a professor at Ca' Foscari University of Venice and senior associate at the National Research Council's Polar Science Institute, commented on the achievement, stating that this represents the longest continuous record of past climate obtained through an ice core, revealing the connection between the carbon cycle and Earth's temperature.
Preliminary analyses conducted on-site indicate that the first 2,480 meters of ice contain a climate record dating back 1.2 million years, with a single meter of ice compressing information from 13,000 years of climate history. Julien Westhoff, the field scientific leader and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Copenhagen, noted the significance of these findings.
The field coordinator, Frank Wilhelms, an associate professor at the University of Göttingen and the Alfred Wegener Institute, added that identifying the optimal drilling site required several seasons of work and the application of advanced radio-echo sounding technologies. The project has extended the previous record from the EPICA project established two decades ago.
In addition to the climate record, the last 210 meters of the ice core consist of very old and heavily deformed ice, potentially mixed or refrozen, of unknown origin. Advanced analyses could test previous theories about the behavior of refrozen ice beneath the Antarctic ice sheet, shedding light on the glaciation history of East Antarctica.
The European team has completed over 200 days of drilling operations and ice core analyses across four working seasons in the challenging environment of the Antarctic central plateau, at an altitude of 3,200 meters and an average summer temperature of -35°C. The ice cores from the Beyond EPICA project will provide unprecedented information on the Mid-Pleistocene Transition, a period from 900,000 to 1.2 million years ago when glacial cycles slowed from intervals of 41,000 years to 100,000 years.
Chiara Venier, a research technologist at Cnr-Isp and project manager of Beyond EPICA, confirmed that this extraordinary achievement aligns with the work plan agreed upon with the European Commission. Preliminary isotopic analyses of the ice core allow for daily monitoring of drilling progress and synchronization with the previously extracted EPICA core and marine sediment records.
The Beyond EPICA project benefits from synergy with research conducted under the National Program of Antarctic Research (PNRA), funded by the Ministry of University and Research and coordinated by Cnr for scientific oversight. The ice cores extracted during this campaign will be transported to Europe on the icebreaker Laura Bassi, maintaining a cold chain at -50°C, a significant logistical challenge.
Once in Europe, the focus will shift to analyzing the samples to unveil the climatic and atmospheric history of the Earth over the past 1.5 million years. The deepest sections of the core may also contain ice older than the Quaternary period. Dating the underlying rocks will determine when this region of Antarctica was last ice-free.