A small sample of the world’s oldest ice arrived at a UK research center on July 18, 2025. This piece of ice is thought to be more than 1.2 million years old and was found in the depths of the East Antarctic Ocean.

For the next 7 weeks, scientists at the research center will slowly melt the ice. But it’s not the ice they’re interested in; it’s what’s inside it. This chunk of ice will contain algae, volcanic ash, ancient dust, and whatever was trapped inside of it when the water turned into ice.

Dr. Liz Thomas, the head of ice core research at the British Antarctic Survey stated that, “This is a completely unknown period of our Earth’s history” “Our climate system has been through so many different changes that we really need to be able to go back in time to understand these different processes and different tipping points,” Dr Thomas told BBC news in an interview.

These particles were formed thousands of years ago, and scientists hope that it will give them a clue about Earth‘s past, like wind patterns, sea levels, and temperatures. This may help with a major problem we’re dealing with right now, climate change; scientists think that after knowing what the temperature was in the past, they can predict climate change.

The ice would be stored in frozen caves, and then they would cut the ice into exact meter blocks. After the ice was ready to be shipped, they carefully loaded the ice onto a boat from Antarctica to labs in the UK, Germany, and Switzerland.