geography
An international drilling team spent years boring nearly 2.8 kilometers through the Antarctic ice sheet all the way down to bedrock near Concordia Research Station.
The Beyond EPICA project drilled nearly 2.8 kilometers down through the Antarctic ice sheet to bedrock near Concordia Research Station, pulling up a continuous ice core containing layers built up over an enormous span of time. Scientists determined the oldest ice in that core is at least 1.2 million years old, making it the oldest continuous ice ever recovered, since each layer traps tiny bubbles of ancient air that record what Earth's atmosphere was like when it froze.
The achievement was about the extreme age of the ice, not simply the physical length of the core, and while ice cores can preserve ancient pollen or dust, this project wasn't about discovering a fossil either — the real prize was the trapped air itself.
Studying air bubbles from roughly a million years ago could help explain a mysterious shift in Earth's ice age cycle timing that occurred around that period, something scientists have struggled to fully understand.
geography
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