The Italian scientific contribution to the Beyond EPICA project - Oldest Ice

In order to better control the response of Earth's climate to continuous emissions, it is essential to look toward the past. A key advance would be to understand how climate responded to changes in orbital forcings during the Middle Pleistocene transition (900-1200 years ago) and in particular the role of greenhouse gases and other forcings. Clarifying the links connecting the carbon cycle, ice, atmosphere, and ocean behavior is critical to enable society to design better mitigation and adaptation strategies. Only ice cores contain such quantitative information on past orbital forcing and atmospheric responses. However, ice has not yet been found that can provide the data we need to understand such changes, dating back more than 1 Ma years.

This proposal represents the Italian national contribution to the H2020 Coordination and Support Action (CSA) "Beyond EPICA - Oldest Ice." The national consortium created around this proposal consists of five leading Italian institutes in reconstructing past climate through ice cores. The challenge will be to prepare the ground for obtaining a 1.5-million-year-old ice core from East Antarctica. The objectives of IT-BE-OI are: i) to contribute to the selection of the specific site in the Dome C area through the collection and synthesis of the necessary information and through specific geophysical surveys aimed at the selection and evaluation of the optimal site for the "Oldest Ice" project cores; ii) development of technical and scientific methodologies and training of the future generation of scientists in order to ensure high-resolution analyses of the climatic and environmental information that will be obtained from the ice cores in the framework of the "Oldest Ice" project. Italy's scientific contribution will play an essential role in the international efforts of the H2020 CSA titled "Beyond EPICA - Oldest Ice," to the extent that the CSA does not include any scientific activities on the ground and in the context of the development of analytical methodologies.