Europeans have won the race to ice by over a million years. Thursday January 9, at the end of a fourth drilling season, the Beyond Epica project team, which brings together twelve institutions from ten countries of the Old Continent, announced that it had succeeded in drilling the entire thickness of the Antarctic ice cap to extract cores up to 2,800 meters. Once brought back and analyzed in Europe, these precious samples will allow scientists to reconstruct the history of the Earth’s climate and atmosphere over the last 1.2 million years, at least. Where the longest available record – that of the Epica borehole published in 2004 – was limited to 800,000 years.
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The stakes are high. Launched in 2019, for seven years, Beyond Epica is an eleven million euro project funded by the European Commission. Coordinated by the Institute of Polar Sciences of the National Research Council of Italy, it is intended to explain a climatic episode known as the “Mid-Pleistocene Transition” (MPT) that lives between 900,000 and 1 .2 million years ago, the rhythm of glacial and interglacial periods increased for an unknown reason from 41,000 years to 100,000 years.
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