Deep beneath Antarctica’s ice sheet, an international team has finally drilled through 2.7 kilometers of frozen history and into the rock below, pulling up a core that captures a world that once looked far greener than today’s polar desert. The ice and sediment they recovered preserve traces of ancient forests, rivers, and coastlines, offering the strongest physical evidence yet that the southern continent was once a lush, ice free landscape. By decoding that buried archive, scientists hope to understand how a green Antarctica tipped into a frozen state, and what that transformation can tell us about the planet’s future.
The historic 2.7 km breakthrough into Antarctic bedrock
The latest drilling campaign pushed technology and logistics to the limit, boring roughly 2.7 kilometers through the East Antarctic ice sheet to reach the hard rock foundation of the continent. Crews working in brutal conditions kept the borehole stable, extracted intact cylinders of ice, and then continued into the underlying sediments that had not seen daylight for millions of years. Reporting on the project describes how the team ultimately reached Antarctic bedrock, confirming that the full thickness of the local ice column had been penetrated and that the drill had entered the geological basement that forms the foundation of the Earth’s crust.
That final transition from ice to rock matters because it turns a climate record into a landscape record. The deepest ice preserves bubbles of ancient air and traces of past snowfall, but the sediments beneath can trap pollen, organic fragments, and mineral grains that record rivers, soils, and even shorelines that existed before the ice sheet formed. According to accounts of the field season, the team recovered more than 200 meters of subglacial material, a haul that researchers expect to analyze grain by grain for signs of a long vanished ecosystem. The very fact that such a thick package of sediment sits directly on the foundation of the continent suggests that flowing water and open ground once dominated this region.
Beyond EPICA and the quest for the oldest ice
The bedrock breakthrough builds on years of work by the Beyond EPICA, Oldest Ice project, which has been steadily extending the climate record deeper into time. In its fourth Antarctic campaign, the collaboration reported that it had recovered ice at least 1.2 million years old, a milestone that pushes direct observations of greenhouse gases and temperature back across a critical transition in Earth’s climate system. Scientists involved in Beyond EPICA describe how the new core, drilled in the interior of the East Antarctic plateau, captures the shift from 40,000 year to 100,000 year ice age cycles, a change that reshaped the rhythm of glaciations worldwide.
That 1.2 million year benchmark is not just a curiosity, it is the baseline needed to understand how a once temperate Antarctica became locked under ice. By comparing the trapped air in the oldest layers with younger sections, researchers can see how carbon dioxide, methane, and temperature evolved as the ice sheet expanded. The Beyond EPICA team has emphasized that the core could eventually extend beyond 1.2 million years, potentially reaching back toward the time when forests and tundra still covered parts of the continent. The new bedrock drilling site complements that effort by targeting a location where the ice column is thinner and the underlying sediments are more accessible, giving scientists a chance to connect the atmospheric story recorded by oldest ice with the physical remains of the landscapes that once lay beneath it.
From 1.7 miles of ice to 228 meters of ancient sediment
Earlier work had already shown how far drilling technology could reach into the Antarctic interior. In one widely cited effort, Scientists reported that they had drilled 1.7 miles into the ice, retrieving a continuous core that spans at least 1.2 m years of climate history. That project, carried out in the heart of Antarctica, demonstrated that it was possible to keep a borehole straight and uncontaminated through more than a vertical mile of layered snow and ice, each year’s snowfall compressed into a thin sheet stacked on top of the next. The resulting archive allowed researchers to track swings in greenhouse gases and temperature across dozens of glacial cycles.
The new campaign goes further by not stopping at the ice rock boundary. Field updates describe how an international team working in Jan in the Antarctic interior successfully drilled through the ice and then continued into the sediments, ultimately recovering 228 meters of subglacial material. Those 228 meters, highlighted in a dispatch shared by Earth science researchers, represent one of the thickest continuous sediment sequences ever obtained from beneath the ice sheet. The team’s summary notes that the cores were extracted by a group of scientists in Antarctica, who emphasized that the sediment’s color changes, grain sizes, and occasional organic flecks hint at repeated episodes of open water, erosion, and vegetation before the ice advanced.
What the 2.8-kilometer core reveals about a green Antarctica
Clues to that greener past are already emerging from another deep drilling effort that reached 2.8-kilometer depth in the East Antarctic ice sheet. In reports from ISTANBUL, an international team announced that they had drilled a 2.8-kilometer ice core, reaching layers that preserve a continuous record of climate stretching back at least 1.2 million years. The scientists involved explained that the chemistry and trapped gases in those layers document the shift from shorter, 40,000 year ice age cycles to longer, 100,000 year intervals, a change that coincided with the growth of thicker, more persistent ice across ISTANBUL-reported study sites. That transition marks the point when Antarctica’s ice sheet became more stable and extensive, burying the last remnants of its earlier, greener landscapes.
By tying the 2.8-kilometer climate record to the newly recovered sediments, researchers can start to reconstruct how that transformation unfolded on the ground. Layers of sand and silt in the subglacial cores point to ancient rivers and coastal plains, while finer muds suggest quiet lakes or shallow seas that once lapped against now buried bedrock. If pollen or plant fragments are found, they would provide direct proof that forests or shrublands once grew where ice now dominates. The team that reported the 2.8-kilometer core noted that the deepest ice layers capture the onset of the 100,000 year cycles, and by matching those layers to specific horizons in the sediments, scientists can test whether the advance of the ice sheet was gradual or punctuated by rapid jumps. The 2.8-kilometer record therefore acts as a timeline against which the buried evidence of rivers, soils, and vegetation can be aligned.
Why this “lost continent” record matters for our future
For climate scientists, the allure of a green Antarctica is not nostalgia, it is a warning. The ice and sediments now in cold storage show how a continent that once supported flowing water and, very likely, extensive vegetation could flip into a state dominated by thick ice sheets. Researchers quoted in coverage of the drilling have described the moment the deepest core segments were brought to the surface as “historic,” a sentiment echoed by Science Edit writer Mark Kaufman, who highlighted how the unprecedented specimen from Antarctica captures a turning point in Earth’s climate. The fact that the planet has toggled between ice free and ice covered states in the past underscores that the current configuration of ice sheets and sea level is not fixed.
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