Rahul Somvanshi
Scientists have achieved a breakthrough in climate research by extracting the world’s longest continuous ice core from Antarctica, reaching depths of 2,800 meters and uncovering climate records dating back 1.2 million years.
The Beyond EPICA-Oldest Ice project, funded by the European Commission, represents a collaborative effort of researchers from ten European nations working at the remote Little Dome C site. Operating in extreme conditions with average summer temperatures of -35°C, the team completed more than two hundred days of drilling across four seasons.
“From preliminary analyses recorded at Little Dome C, we have a strong indication that the uppermost 2,480 meters contain a climate record where up to 13,000 years are compressed into one meter of ice,” explains Julien Westhoff, chief scientist and postdoc at Copenhagen University.
The ice core’s significance lies in its preserved atmospheric data. The samples contain trapped air bubbles with greenhouse gases and temperature indicators that extend beyond previous ice core records. This extended timeline covers the Mid-Pleistocene Transition, when Earth’s glacial cycles shifted from 41,000-year to 100,000-year intervals.
Dr. Robert Mulvaney from the British Antarctic Survey emphasizes the site’s crucial location: “We needed a Goldilocks site – ice thick enough for a well-resolved climate record at the greatest depth, but not too thick that the oldest ice had melted away.”
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Current analysis shows carbon dioxide levels have increased 50% above the highest levels recorded in the past 800,000 years since the Industrial Revolution began, according to Carlo Barbante, project coordinator and director of Italy’s Polar Science Institute.
The lowest 210 meters of the core, positioned just above bedrock, contains heavily deformed ice that might reveal East Antarctica’s glaciation history and potentially preserve ice from the pre-Quaternary period (2.58 million years ago).
The samples will be transported to European laboratories in specialized cold containers for detailed analysis, which scientists expect will provide unprecedented insights into Earth’s climate system and the relationship between greenhouse gases and global temperatures across geological timescales.
This historic achievement advances our understanding of Earth’s climate patterns and offers valuable context for current climate change observations. The data will help scientists better comprehend how atmospheric composition influences global temperature variations over extended periods.
