About Beyond EPICA – Oldest Ice project

Context

The Antarctic ice sheet contains a unique record of the Earth’s climate history.

Direct information about past climate forcing and atmospheric responses are important to better constrain climate model projections of the longterm response of Earth’s climate system to continuing greenhouse gas emissions. Studying the causes of the Mid-Pleistocene transition (900 thousand years ago to 1.2 million years ago), when the alternation of the cycle of glacial and interglacial periods changed from 40 thousand years to 100 thousand years, will be crucial to understand the cause-effect relationship in climate systems.

The EPICA project collected ice from 800.000 years ago. Under the project Beyond EPICA Oldest Ice, a new continuous deep ice core will be soon drilled down to the bedrock in East Antarctica and will recover potentially 1.5 million of years (Ma).

Main objectives

The Beyond EPICA project’s main goal is to obtain quantitative, high-resolution ice-core information on climate and environmental changes over the last 1.5 million years in Antarctica.

  • Retrieve a continuous ice core to bedrock in Antarctica, covering the climate history of the Mid Pleistocene Transition and beyond, where glacial/interglacial cycles changed from a 40,000 to a 100,000 yr cyclicity
  • Derive first high-resolution climate records over the time interval older than 700 kyr
  • Use the new climate records to constraint the cause of the Mid Pleistocene Transition and long-term carbon cycle-climate feedbacks

Participants

Beyond EPICA involves experts from 12 institutions and 4 third parties organisations, in ten European countries. The project is coordinated by Prof. Carlo Barbante from the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and the Institute of Polar Sciences of the National Research Council of Italy (ISP-CNR) in Venice.

Project partners

ISP-CNR: The Institute of Polar Sciences of the National Research Council of Italy (Italy)

AWI: The Alfred-Wegener Institute (Germany)

UKRI-BAS: The British Antarctic Survey (UK)

IPEV: The French Polar Institute (France)

ENEA: The National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development (Italy)

CNRS: The National Scientific Research Centre (France)

UU: The Utrecht University (Netherlands)

NPI: The Norwegian Polar Institute (Norway)

SU: The University of Stockholm (Sweden)

UBERN : The University of Bern (Switzerland)

UCPH : The University of Copenhagen (Denmark)

ULB: The Brussels University (Belgium)

Project partners

ISP-CNR: The Institute of Polar Sciences of the National Research Council of Italy (Italy)

AWI: The Alfred-Wegener Institute (Germany)

UKRI-BAS: The British Antarctic Survey (UK)

IPEV: The French Polar Institute (France)

ENEA: The National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development (Italy)

CNRS: The National Scientific Research Centre (France)

UU: The Utrecht University (Netherlands)

NPI: The Norwegian Polar Institute (Norway)

SU: The University of Stockholm (Sweden)

UBERN : The University of Bern (Switzerland)

UCPH : The University of Copenhagen (Denmark)

ULB: The Brussels University (Belgium)

Third parties

Ca’Foscari University of Venice (linked to ISP-CNR)

University of Grenoble Alpes (linked to CNRS)

French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (linked to CNRS)

University of Bergen (linked to NPI)

More information about Beyond EPICA – Oldest Ice project

  • Beyond EPICA factsheet

  • Beyond EPICA Trailer video