Scientists Melt World’s Oldest Ice

In the UK, scientists took a sample of the world’s “oldest ice” from Antarctica for testing. The ice was taken earlier in 2025. The ice is 1.2 million years old.

An ice core that may be older than 1.5 million years has been harvested and brought to the UK where scientists will melt it to unlock vital information about Earth’s climate. The glassy cylinder is the planet’s oldest ice and was drilled from deep inside the Antarctic ice sheet. Frozen inside is thousands of years of new information that scientists say could “revolutionize” what we know about climate change.

“This is a completely unknown period of our Earth’s history,” says Dr Liz Thomas, head of ice core research at the British Antarctic Survey. The ice has been put in was a ice cave with red warning lights flashing above the door, and inside there is an emergency escape hatch into a tunnel in case something went wrong.

It was a huge multinational effort to extract the ice cores in Antarctica, at a cost of millions. The ice was chopped into 1m blocks and transported by ship and then in a cold van to Cambridge. Engineer James Veale helped to extract the ice close to the Concordia base in eastern Antarctica. “To hold that in my carefully gloved hands and be very careful not to drop the sections – it was an amazing feeling,” he explained.

The cores may have evidence of a time when sea levels were much higher than they are now and when the vast Antarctic ice sheets were smaller. The presence of dust in the ice will help scientists understand how the ice sheets shrank and contributed to sea level rise – something that is a major concern this century.