What was the climate like thousands or even millions of years ago? The deep ice in Antarctica could provide answers: It contains information about temperature development and the composition of the atmosphere of the past. An international research team aims to decode this information in the Beyond EPICA-Oldest Ice project, with a drill core containing climate data from the last 1.5 million years. At the end of January, the project team successfully completed the first campaign and lifted the first cores. Scientists from the Alfred Wegener Institute were instrumental in the planning and also on site.
From the end of November 2021 to the end of January 2022, the scientists set up a camp for the drilling site at Little Dome C in Antarctica and installed a complex drilling system that will be required for the campaign in the coming years. Little Dome C is a ten-square-kilometer area and one of the most extreme places on Earth. Drilling took place at an altitude of 3233 meters above sea level, with average Antarctic summer temperatures almost always below minus 40 degrees Celsius.
The drilling tent now contains the control cabin, a tilting drilling tower for the maneuvering of the drilling system - which can extract ice cores up to 4.5-metre-long - and a laboratory for sampling preparation and storage. Over the next three Antarctic summers, each from mid-November to early February, the Beyond EPICA team will drill until it reaches ice up to 1.5 million years old at a depth of about 2,500 metres. The ice contains air bubbles from which the researchers will be able to determine the levels of greenhouse gases such as methane and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, as well as past temperature trends. The first data from the drill core analyses should be available in 2025.
During the first drilling campaign, the research team reached a depth of 130 metres, where the ice preserves information on the climate and atmosphere of approximately the last 3000 years. The first firn and ice cores of Beyond EPICA are currently stored at the Italian-French Concordia Station on the eastern Antarctic plateau. Beyond EPICA is coordinated by Prof. Carlo Barbante, director of the Institute of Polar Sciences of the Italian National Research Council (Cnr-Isp) and professor at Ca' Foscari University in Venice. "We are very satisfied with the work done so far. Our next campaign will involve a final testing of the drilling system and then speedily proceeding to conduct deep drilling."
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 successfully helped set up the deep drilling: "Together with our partners, we were able to achieve the ambitious goals despite the considerable restrictions imposed by Covid-19." 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 give us information on the climate of the past and on the greenhouse gases that were in the atmosphere during the Mid-Pleistocene Transition (MPT), which happened between 900,000 and 1.2 million years ago,” says Barbante. “During this transition, climate periodicity between ice ages changed from 41,000 to 100,000 years: the reason why this happened is the mystery we hope to solve.”
Twelve research institutions from Germany, Italy, France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark and Belgium are collaborating in Beyond EPICA-Oldest Ice. Participants on site were: Carlo Barbante from the Institute of Polar Sciences of the National Research Council of Italy (Cnr-Isp) and Ca' Foscari University, Matthias Hüther from AWI, Thomas Stocker, Remo Walther and Jakob Schwander from the University of Bern, Philippe Possenti, Gregory Teste, Olivier Alemany and Romain Duphil from the University of Grenoble-Alpes, Michele Scalet, Saverio Panichi, Giacomo Bonanno and Calogero Monaco from the National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development (Italy). The European Commission is funding the project with eleven million euros.
