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.

Of particular interest is the change in the Earth's climate response to orbital forcing during the 'Pleistocene Mid-Transition' (PMT), about 1 million years ago, when the dominant glacial/interglacial cyclicity shifted from 40,000 years to 100,000 years.

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

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