For nine years, a team of European scientists had been looking for one very specific patch of ice, buried under nearly two miles of the Antarctic ice sheet. In January 2025, they finally hit it. Drilling at a site called Little Dome C, in East Antarctica, the Beyond EPICA project pulled a continuous ice core up from a depth of 2,800 meters, all the way down to where the ice sheet meets bare rock.
The ice at the very bottom of that core had fallen as snow more than 1.2 million years ago, making it the oldest continuous ice record ever recovered, and stretching the climate archive scientists can read from ice by roughly 50 percent past the previous record.
Chasing a number that kept moving
The team’s target wasn’t a nice round number, it was a scientific mystery called the Mid-Pleistocene Transition. Somewhere between about 900,000 and 1.2 million years ago, the rhythm of Earth’s ice ages abruptly changed gears, shifting from cycles that repeated roughly every 40,000 years to cycles about 100,000 years long, and nobody has ever fully explained why.
To catch that transition inside actual, dateable ice, the team needed a core reaching back well past the previous world record: an 800,000-year-old core drilled by the original EPICA project, this same group’s predecessor, back in 2004.
Little Dome C, roughly 35 kilometers from the Concordia research station and nearly 600 miles from the coast, was chosen after years of radar surveys and computer modeling meant to find ice that was old, thick, and crucially not so close to bedrock that geothermal heat had melted or scrambled the oldest layers.
Drilling began in the 2021/2022 season and ran across four separate Antarctic summer field campaigns, the only time of year the site is workable at all, since winter temperatures there make sustained fieldwork impossible.
Two miles down, minus 35 degrees
The conditions the drilling team worked in were brutal even by Antarctic standards. Little Dome C sits at roughly 3,200 meters above sea level, with average summer temperatures around minus 35 degrees Celsius, and the team logged more than two hundred days of drilling and ice-core processing spread across the four seasons.
Federico Scoto, one of the glaciologists on site when the drill finally reached rock in early January 2025, described it simply as a great moment for the team, recalling the feeling of reaching the bedrock after so many years of preparation.
Carlo Barbante, the Italian glaciologist who coordinates Beyond EPICA and directs Italy’s Polar Science Institute, framed the payoff in terms of what the ice can tell scientists that nothing else can.
Trapped inside the ice are tiny air bubbles, pockets of Earth’s actual ancient atmosphere sealed the moment the snow above them compressed into ice, and Barbante said the core would let researchers see exactly how greenhouse gases, chemicals, and dust in the atmosphere have changed over that time.
The deepest, oldest section of the core corresponds to the Calabrian stage of the Lower Pleistocene, a period when Homo erectus, not Homo sapiens, was among the dominant hominins walking the Earth.
Getting the ice home was its own operation
Extracting the ice was only half the job. Ice cores have to stay frozen and undisturbed the entire way from the middle of Antarctica to laboratories in Europe, and Beyond EPICA moved its samples using the icebreaker Laura Bassi, transporting the ice in refrigerated containers held at around minus 50 degrees Celsius for the voyage.
According to the British Antarctic Survey, the last sections of the Dome C core did not actually arrive in European labs until April 2026, more than a year after drilling finished, underlining how much logistics alone can slow down a discovery like this one.
What the ice is expected to say
As of mid-2026, full results were still emerging. Researchers presenting early findings at the European Geosciences Union’s 2026 General Assembly described ongoing work on orbital dating of the core, mineral dust records, and gas diffusion through the ice, the kind of unglamorous, methodical analysis that has to happen before scientists can say with confidence what the ancient air actually reveals about the Mid Pleistocene Transition.
Early high resolution isotope sampling, done at a resolution of 25 centimeters through the core, has already begun mapping out those climate fluctuations layer by layer.
It’s a reminder that a headline like “1.2 million year old ice” describes the moment of discovery, not the moment of understanding. The bubbles have been located and pulled to the surface.
What they actually say about the ancient air our early relatives breathed, and about why Earth’s ice ages fundamentally changed their pace nearly a million years ago, is still being read out of them one careful measurement at a time.