An international team of scientists in the Antarctic has successfully extracted a 2.8 km long core of ice that may hold important answers for climate science. They drilled all the way down to the bedrock beneath the Antarctic ice sheet, and have preserved the entire core. Why is this ice so valuable to climate scientists? Because the air bubbles trapped inside the ice are “like tiny time capsules of Earth’s atmospheric past”. They provide a continuous record of our planet’s climate history for the past 1.2 million years! This information will shed more light on the natural climate cycles that our planet has always had. This was the fourth Antarctic field mission for the ‘Beyond EPICA - Oldest Ice’ project, funded by the European Commission. Carlo Barbante, the coordinator of the mission, said: “This is the longest continuous record of our past climate from an ice core, and it can reveal the interlink between the carbon cycle and temperature of our planet.” This should provide interesting data on whether or not carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has ever been an important factor in the cyclical changes of climate throughout history.