International cooperation is the key to success for the Million Year Ice Core project in Antarctica

A team of scientists have collected a 400 metre ice core from Antarctica at the completion of the second drilling season of the Million Year Ice Core (MYIC) project. 

The team, lead by Dr. Joel Pedro, consisted of 18 scientists, and involved over two months of work in Antarctica. The project required significant logistical preparation, including extensive surveys of the site and development of specialised equipment. 

“The groundwork for this season stretches back many years,” says Pedro, emphasising that cooperation across nations and institutions was critical to success. 

International cooperation

With 1200km separating the scientific base at Casey Station and the drilling site at Dome C, the project required a traverse team to to pre-position equipment. French and Italian traverse logistics enabled scientists to maximise drilling time before the weather worsened.

Traverse team leader, Damien Beloin, said despite the “challenging” conditions, social connection was one of the highlights. 

He says weekly volleyball games and birthday celebrations with the French/Italian Concordia station strengthened bonds between nations.

“Some of us did not know each other before we got there, but within a few weeks we’d formed a very solid and experienced group in the middle of Antarctica,” Mr Beloin said.

Dr. Andy Menking, a paleoclimatologist from the Australian Antarctic Program Partnership, agrees that “international cooperation is enormously important.”

“The Australians have benefitted greatly from European logistical support in recent field seasons,” he said. 

“We are lucky to have a very collegial community within the ice core sciences that tends to put science, problem-solving and curiosity as first priorities.” 

Ice cores and climate change 

Scientists analyse air bubbles in ice cores to reconstruct past climates. The longest ice core drilled in Antarctica, at 2800 meters long, provides insight into 1.2 million years of Earth’s climate, including air temperature and the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. 

Dr. Menking says ice cores are critical to understanding climate change. 

“Carbon dioxide is now more abundant in the atmosphere than it has been in over 800,000 years, and it got there in a manner that was much faster than any of the CO₂ changes we have so far reconstructed in the past. We only know this kind of information reliably from studying Antarctic ice cores.”