European countries organized the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica (EPICA) to drill deep Antarctic ice cores and reconstruct past climate and atmosphere. The project’s strategy was to drill at two contrasting sites so scientists could compare regional climate signals across Antarctica.
EPICA began its first deep-drilling campaign at Dome C on the East Antarctic Plateau during the 1996–1997 austral summer. Dome C was chosen because low snowfall there helps preserve a very long, relatively undisturbed climate record in the ice.
A second major Dome C drilling effort (often referred to as EDC99) started in 1999 to extend the deep core and improve drilling progress. This helped EPICA move toward its goal of capturing multiple glacial–interglacial cycles (ice ages and warmer periods) in one continuous record.
Germany opened Kohnen Station in Dronning Maud Land as the inland base for EPICA’s Atlantic-sector drilling site. Establishing this station was a key logistical step because deep drilling requires a stable camp, power, storage, and a protected drilling trench.
EPICA began deep coring at Kohnen Station in the 2001–2002 austral summer, creating the EPICA Dronning Maud Land (EDML) core. Compared with Dome C, this site has higher snowfall, giving a more detailed (higher-resolution) record for key time periods.
Early stable-isotope measurements (water-isotope ratios used as a temperature proxy) from the EDML core helped set up comparisons between the Atlantic-sector and East Antarctic records. This mattered because EPICA’s two-site design aimed to separate local effects from broader climate patterns.
By the 2003–2004 season, reports described the EPICA Dome C core as already over 3,190 m long and extending to roughly 740,000 years, with only difficult bottom ice remaining. At the same time, EDML drilling at Kohnen Station was continuing to deepen its complementary record.
EPICA researchers reported that the Dome C core provided an Antarctic climate record reaching back about 740,000 years, spanning roughly eight glacial cycles. This was a major expansion beyond earlier ice-core records and strengthened the use of Antarctic ice as a long-term climate archive.
In December 2004, EPICA stopped drilling at Dome C at about 3,270.2 meters depth, estimated to be roughly 16 meters above bedrock. The difficult bottom-ice conditions and safety/environment concerns helped drive the decision to stop rather than risk losing equipment or contaminating the site.
The main EPICA drilling program is commonly described as running through the mid-2000s, after completing the Dome C deep core and advancing the EDML effort. By this point, EPICA had established long Antarctic reference records used widely in climate research and later synthesis work.
During the 2005–2006 field season, the EDML drilling at Kohnen Station reached bedrock, completing the second deep EPICA core at about 2,774 m. This finished the two-core design that allowed stronger cross-checking of timing and mechanisms of climate change between regions.
EPICA received the European Union’s Descartes Prize for collaborative research, recognizing the scale and impact of its multinational ice-core work. The award marked a clear outcome of the 1996–2004 drilling era: widely used records of climate and greenhouse gases extending to about 800,000 years, plus a second Antarctic core for comparison.
EPICA Antarctic ice-core project (1996–2004)