At the remote Little Dome C site in Antarctica, a research team representing twelve scientific institutions from ten European nations has just achieved a historic milestone for climate science. As part of the European-funded Beyond EPICA - Oldest Ice project, the team successfully concluded a decisive drilling campaign, reaching the depth of 2,800 meters—where the Antarctic ice sheet meets the bedrock.

The extracted ice preserves an unprecedented record of Earth’s climate history, continuous information on atmospheric temperatures and pristine samples of old air with greenhouse gases spanning over 1.2-million-year-old ice and probably beyond.