2750 meters deep, to go back in time to 1.5 million years. The Beyond Epica project, the next major European borehole in the Antarctic ice where the first snowflake fell 30 million years ago, aims to better understand the history of our planet's climate. In particular the key period during which the cycles of glaciation are spaced, passing from 40,000 to 100,000 years. An era at least 900,000 years old, which the current record holder did not cover: the Epica project (European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica) had made it possible, in 2007, to decipher the climate over 800,000 years.
Read also: The history of climate inscribed in the ice of the South Pole
"We hope this ice core will give us information about the Antarctic climate and the greenhouse gases present during the transition from the Middle Pleistocene between 900,000 and 1.2 million years ago," says Carlo Barbante, professor at Ca'Foscari University in Venice and the Institute of Polar Sciences in
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