Drilling has begun in Australia's quest for the oldest, continuous ice core record of Earth's climate, dating back more than one million years.
Australian Antarctic Program scientists are on location at 'Dome C North' - a mound of ice in East Antarctica that ice-flow modelling and radar data shows may contain ice up to two million years old.
Over the past two years, teams have prepositioned equipment and drilled test cores at a nearby site.
Now, drilling at Dome C North has begun in earnest, to retrieve the most detailed continuous record of how the Earth's atmospheric composition and climate have changed over centuries.
Palaeoclimate scientist Dr Joel Pedro is leading the Million Year Ice Core (MYIC) project team, who will use a drill, built in Hobart by the Australian Antarctic Division, to extract ancient ice from three kilometres beneath the Antarctic ice sheet surface.
"Bubbles of air that became trapped in the ice as snow fell, along with trace levels of natural and man-made chemical markers, provide us with the most detailed record of how the Earth's atmospheric composition and climate have changed through time," Dr Pedro said.
"This information is pivotal to our understanding of climate and our ability to predict climate in the future.
"This includes helping to answer a long-standing puzzle of why, before about one million years ago, there was a change in the state of the Earth's climate system to shorter ice-age cycles and smaller ice sheets.
"Capturing this record requires more than three kilometres of drilling, and we'll tackle this over multiple summers."
Identifying the ideal drill site was the result of years of collaboration between Australian, European and US science teams, collecting and sharing radar imagery from extensive ground and aerial surveys of the ice sheet, along with modelling expertise.
