Brussels universities have now changed their approach in the search for Antarctic ice that is 100,000 or even 1,000,000 years old

Vertical drilling in the ice cap down to a depth of several kilometres is time-consuming, technically complex, labour-intensive and expensive. Scientists from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) are attempting to use a different method to discover the changes that have taken place in our climate. 

Snow on the surface eventually turns into ice. The air bubbles that become trapped are then removed from the ice under high pressure in the lab. The contents of those air bubbles can tell us a lot about CO₂ levels in the atmosphere and therefore about the climate that existed hundreds of thousands of years ago. This should give us a better understanding of the climate disruption taking place today and therefore help us predict the climate that may exist in the future more effectively. 

For this research team made up of staff from the VUB and the ULB, blue ice regions are the key when it comes to finding very old ice. There, the oldest ice, which can be found at the lowest depths, is pushed to the surface, where strong winds blow away the snow and turn the ice a beautiful blue. This therefore does away with the need to carry out costly deep drilling, as previous international expeditions had to do. In total, the scientists from Belgium collected over 1,000 surface ice samples and 15 shallow ice cores in the Nils Larsen Blue Ice Field, near the Sør Rondane Mountains and the Princess Elisabeth Base on the northern edge of Antarctica. The samples were then shipped to the laboratories at the VUB and ULB for analysis. The team is now also trying to identify the perfect location where it will be possible to drill down to a depth of around 200 metres and extract an ice core that could be up to one million years old. After that, the second field campaign of the so-called FROID project will follow in 2026-2027.