Researchers Discover Ice Estimated to be 1.2 Million Years Old Beneath Antarctica

In their pursuit of the oldest ice on Earth, researchers have accomplished the impressive task of drilling a 2,800-meter (9,186-foot) ice core, penetrating all the way to the bedrock beneath the Antarctic ice sheet. This remarkable achievement uncovers a continuous climate history of our planet stretching back at least 1.2 million years.

The ice core was obtained from a remote site in Antarctica called Little Dome C by researchers from the “Beyond EPICA - Oldest Ice” project, funded by the European Commission.

“The right location was identified using cutting-edge radio echo sounding technologies and ice flow modeling. Impressively, we found the record that goes from 0.8 to 1.2 million years ago, exactly where it was predicted to be, in the depth range between 2,426 and 2,490 meters [7,959 and 8,169 feet], extending our previous twenty-year-old EPICA ice core record,” Frank Wilhelms, principal investigator in the field and joint professor at Göttingen University and the Alfred Wegener Institute, said in a statement.

Antarctica is covered in extremely chunky ice sheets that sit on top of continental bedrock. The latest expedition by Beyond EPICA has reached the transition point between ice and rock, which could provide important clu