If you could look back in time, what would you search out?

Would you head back to Ancient Egypt, visit the dinosaurs, step into Medieval times, or even the Stone Age?

Think of all the unsolved mysteries, the questions we have about the history of our species and our planet, that you could answer.

And thanks to work ongoing by the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, researchers are about to do exactly that: look back in time – 1.5 million years back in time, to be precise.

That’s all down to the Beyond EPICA – Oldest Ice project, which has seen researchers drill up to 2,800 meters underground in East Antarctica, and retrieve ice cores that date back one and a half million years into our planet’s history.

And impressively, these ice cores have now made it all the way back to Europe for analysis, with the hopes that doing so will provide scientists with 1.5 million years of detailed history of our planet’s climate, including how the climate and greenhouse gas concentrations have changed over this period.

Thanks to the ability of Antarctica’s ice to effectively freeze a climate record, this project will be monumental in providing researchers with an extra 800,000 years of climate history on top of what we already have, as the British Antarctic Survey’s Dr Liz Thomas explained in a statement:

“There is no other place on Earth that retains such a long record of the past atmosphere as Antarctica. It’s our best hope to understand the fundamental drivers of Earth’s climate shifts It’s incredibly exciting to be part of this international effort to unlock the deepest secrets of Antarctica’s ice.

The project is driven by a central scientific question: why did the planet’s climate cycle shift roughly one million years ago from a 41,000-year to a 100,000-year phasing of glacial-interglacial cycles? By extending the ice core record beyond this turning point, researchers hope to improve predictions of how Earth’s climate may respond to future greenhouse gas increases.”

The analysis of the ice cores will bring our understanding of climate history forward leaps and bounds thanks to the precise techniques that ice allows.

Unlike marine sediment cores, which have previously been used to understand how our climate has cycled, the ice cores can be slowly melted to understand the chemicals and isotopes present in the climate at different stages in our planet’s history.

That’s because bubbles in ice effectively freeze atmospheric conditions in time, allowing not only the gases and elements at any particular time to be discovered, but the planet’s temperatures too, as Dr Thomas continues:

“Our data will yield the first continuous reconstructions of key environmental indicators—including atmospheric temperatures, wind patterns, sea ice extent, and marine productivity—spanning the past 1.5 million years. 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.”

As we continue the vital fight against the climate crisis, this deeper understanding – using the world’s oldest ice core sample – is highly important in deepening our understanding of our climate and atmosphere throughout history, and helping to understand and prepare for what could, ultimately, go wrong.

If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about the mysterious “pyramids” discovered in Antarctica. What are they?