Beyond EPICA explores the climate of the past – drilling commences

The participating researchers’ goal is to gather an ice core from Little Dome C by January 2022. The ten-square-kilometre summit lies roughly 40 kilometres from the joint Italian-French research facility Concordia Station in East Antarctica, one of the most extreme places on Earth. The ice-core drilling will take place at an elevation of 3,233 metres above sea level, at average summer temperatures for the Antarctic of minus 35 degrees Celsius. Ideally, the team will penetrate 170 metres per week until, three Antarctic summers later, they reach a depth of ca. 2,500 metres – and ice that is up to 1.5 million years old. The air bubbles trapped inside will allow the researchers to determine the amounts of greenhouse gases like methane and carbon dioxide in the ancient atmosphere.

“In the course of our previous project, EPICA (European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica), which ended in 2008, we successfully drilled and analysed an 800,000-year-old ice core. Now we’ll attempt to travel even farther back in time: if our goal is to gain an accurate perspective on the current climate change around the world and design suitable strategies for mitigating climate change, we have to look back even farther in the past – and that’s precisely what we’re attempting in the Antarctic with Beyond EPICA,” says project coordinator Prof Carlo Barbante, Director of the Italian National Research Council’s Institute of Polar Sciences (Cnr-Isp) and a professor at the Ca' Foscari University of Venice.

In the project’s first phase, the consortium, led by the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), spent three years searching for a location where the ice was sufficiently clearly layered, even at great depths, to provide valuable results. “We’re currently setting up the drilling site and lining the top 120 metres with fiberglass pipes. We’ll then use this casing as the point of departure for the actual deep drilling,” explains Prof Frank Wilhelms, who is responsible for planning and organising the drilling. The AWI’s Matthias Hüther is also on site; as the drilling engineer, he is responsible for preparing the drill. The AWI team is also coordinating several work packages concerning the ice core, e.g. on its physical properties, stable water isotopes, geophysics or the climate and carbon cycle.

“We believe this ice core will provide us information on the past climate and on atmospheric greenhouse gases during the mid-Pleistocene transition 900,000 to 1.2 million years ago,” says Barbante. “During this transition, the periodicity of the climate between ice ages changed from 41,000 to 100,000 years: the reason why is the puzzle that we hope to solve.”

Beyond EPICA-Oldest Ice brings together twelve research institutes from Germany, Italy, France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark and Belgium, and is backed by 11 million euros of funding provided by the European Commission. The first data from the ice-core analyses is expected to be ready by 2025.