From Grenoble to Cambridge, a treasure hunt to better understand the climate using 1.2 million-year-old Antarctic ice

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The oldest samples ever studied from the White Continent are arriving in European university laboratories. The information contained in these precious cores should help us better understand the climate system.

The machines of the "Beyond EPICA – Oldest Ice" project have penetrated a little further into the ice, reaching a depth of 2,800 meters during the last campaign between late 2024 and early 2025. (Wilhelms/PNRA. IPEV)

On the other side of the world, beneath a remote and particularly difficult-to-access land, lie mysterious layers of ice whose secrets have yet to be uncovered by humanity. Since 2019, at the Little Dome C site in the heart of East Antarctica , a consortium of researchers from ten European countries has been working to successfully drill into the region's compacted soil as part of the "Beyond EPICA – Oldest Ice" project, funded by the European Union.

Each year, their machines pushed a little deeper into the ice until they reached a depth of 2,800 meters during the last campaign between late 2024 and early 2025. The precious samples from the giant core collected have since traveled aboard the Italian icebreaker Laura Bass before arriving at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, Germany. There, they were cut up to be distributed to various research laboratories in Belgium, Germany, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Italy, Sweden,

Antarctica Global Warming