Antarctica is excess of only a bucket-list vacation spot for vacationers and a house for penguins. It’s a veritable time machine, holding proof from hundreds of thousands of years of Earth’s climatic historical past deep inside the ice.
Scientists working with the Center for Oldest Ice Exploration (COLDEX) have collected the oldest immediately dated ice cores ever drilled: 6 million years previous. In learning the air and water from the samples, they glimpsed the local weather of the traditional Earth, when the planet was hotter than it’s immediately and sea ranges have been greater — and found proof of a long-term cooling interval.
“The team has built up a library of what we call ‘climate snapshot’’ roughly six times older than any previously reported ice core data, complementing the more detailed younger data from cores in the interior of Antarctica,” COLDEX Director Ed Brook, a paleoclimatologist from Oregon State University, said in a statement.
Tapping into the air bubbles frozen into the ice, scientists measured an argon isotope so far the pattern. Then, trying into oxygen isotopes within the ice, the workforce found there was a long-term cooling interval in the course of the Pliocene period; it appeared that the Earth cooled about 22 levels Fahrenheit (12 levels Celsius) over this era.
The workforce will proceed to review these samples via the lens of local weather change, analyzing and reconstructing ranges of atmospheric greenhouse gases and ocean warmth. They’ll additionally return to Allan Hill to drill extra cores — and hopefully discover much more historic ice.
“Given the spectacularly old ice we have discovered at Allan Hills, we also have designed a comprehensive longer-term new study of this region to try to extend the records even further in time, which we hope to conduct between 2026 and 2031,” stated Brooks.
The workforce’s analysis was revealed in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on October 28, 2025.