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Antarctic ice cores are like a time capsule, preserving tiny pockets of ancient air from the distant past. In a remarkable logistical milestone, European researchers have extracted data from an ice core 1.7 miles (2.8 kilometers) long—a gargantuan sample totaling up to 1.2 million years of Earth’s history.
In a recent statement, the Beyond EPICA–Oldest Ice project announced the completion of its final Antarctic campaign, which successfully retrieved what represents the longest continuous record of Earth’s climate as captured inside an ice core. Experts from 14 laboratories across 10 European countries participated in this project, which began in late 2019. The drilling concluded in 2025, but it was only last month that the last ice core samples (divided into smaller, manageable chunks) arrived in European labs, according to the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), which was involved in the project.
“We faced technological and engineering challenges never before encountered in Antarctic glaciology; success was far from certain,” Carlo Barbante, the project’s coordinator, said in the release. “We have achieved a historic result: enabling science to leaf through the oldest history book—namely, analyzing ice formed over the past 1.2 million years.”
