ANR ToBE

The objective of Toward Beyond EPICA - Oldest Ice is to federate the French community of glaciologists to develop new analytical and numerical tools to characterise, analyse and date the oldest ice in the world, drilled in Antarctica, in the framework of the European project Beyond EPICA - Oldest Ice.

In the current context of anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, it is essential to look to the past to understand how the climate system works.

A particularly interesting issue is the change in the Earth's climatic response to orbital forcing during the 'Pleistocene Mid-Transition' (PMT), around 1 million years ago, when the dominant glacial/interglacial cyclicity shifted from 40,000 years to 100,000 years.

Only ice cores contain direct, quantitative information about past climate forcings and atmospheric responses. However, the longest ice core available to date, EPICA Dome C (EDC), only covers the last 800,000 years.

This is why the European H2020 project "Beyond EPICA - Oldest ICe" (2019-2026), with strong participation from French glaciologists, aims to drill a 1.5 million-year-old ice core near the Franco-Italian Dome C - Concordia station in Antarctica. The aim of the ToBE project is to develop new methods (analytical and numerical), which will be used to study the ice core for the European H2020 project "Beyond EPICA - Oldest ICe".