A century and a half ago, when trains were plying but electricity was still not widely available, intrepid entrepreneurs cut huge chunks of ice from the frozen Great Lakes and transported them to California and Texas to cool drinks in summer.
Decades later, scientists developed a method of collecting ‘ice cores’, cylindrical chunks of ice, from different depths below the surface to study what lay trapped in them and, in turn, decipher the conditions that prevailed during that period. Air bubbles trapped in ice are really books of history.
Now researchers of the British Antarctic Survey are on a project to study ice cores 3 km below the Antarctica plateau to determine the state in which the continent existed 1.5 million years ago. This takes research further back in history, building upon an earlier research that looked at the continent’s climate record 800,000 years ago.
The drilling site, Little Dome C, is about 40 km from the French-operated Concordia Station.
Dr Liz Thomas, Head of the Ice Cores team at the British Antarctic Survey, seeks to unlock the answer to why, a million years ago, the gap between two glacial cycles expanded from 41,000 years to 100,000 years.
With the data collected from the cores, scientists will reconstruct how the environment was back then — temperatures, wind patterns, extent of sea ice, and so o.
“This unprecedented ice core dataset will provide vital insights into the link between atmospheric CO₂ levels and climate during a previously uncharted period in Earth’s history, offering valuable context for predicting future climate change,” Dr Thomas says in a statement.
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Published on July 28, 2025
