Summary
Researchers at the British Antarctic Survey are melting some of the world’s oldest ice cores, drilled from 2.8 kilometers beneath Antarctica, to study the planet’s ancient climate history — a process that destroys the priceless samples forever.
After years of preparation and collaboration involving hundreds of scientists, the ice cores — extracted from the Antarctic ice sheet — arrived at the British Antarctic Survey earlier this summer. Over recent weeks, researchers have been working tirelessly to analyze them before they disappear.
The team is melting the final sections, which date back at least 1.5 million years, making them the oldest ice samples ever studied. By examining the trapped air bubbles and chemical composition, scientists hope to reconstruct atmospheric conditions from a time long before humans existed, offering insight into how greenhouse gases and temperature patterns evolved naturally.
The project aims to produce an unbroken environmental record spanning more than a million years, helping researchers understand how Earth’s climate responded to past changes — and how it might behave in the future.
As the BBC’s Rebecca Morelle reports from the lab, this painstaking effort marks the culmination of a decades-long quest to decode the frozen archives of our planet’s deep past.