Ice containing crucial information about the Earth’s past climate over 1.2 million years has been reached in Antarctica, pushing back the previous record by 400,000 years, announced research team of the program “Beyond EPICA-Oldest Ice “, a consortium of twelve European scientific institutions.
The samples collected will make it possible to reconstruct, for the first time, important parameters of the Earth’s climate and the composition of its atmosphere beyond 800,000 years in the past”, the previous record established in 2024 by the same project. According to the first analysis results, this ice layer would provide a continuous climate record for at least 1.2 million years and potentially beyond: although it has a priori lost part of its paleoclimatic information, the samples. of the deepest 200 meters are likely to contain ice dating back several million years.
However, additional analyzes are necessary to determine whether this ice is usable, once brought back to Europe by boat, stored at -50°C.
It is the longest continuous record of our past climate from an ice core, and it may reveal the link between the carbon cycle and our planet’s temperature.
Each meter of compressed ice records climatic data (temperatures, CO2 concentration, etc.) for a period of up to 13,000 years.
The analyzes should help elucidate the reasons for the mysterious transition that occurred during the mid-Pleistocene, a period between 900,000 years and 1.2 million years in the past, during which glacial cycles saw their amplitude increase and their period go from 41,000 years to 100,000 years, potentially under the effect of variations in the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere
