Towards Beyond EPICA – ToBE

In the context of the current continuing greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere, it is essential to turn to the past to understand how the climate system behaves. A particularly interesting problem is the shift in Earth's climate response to orbital forcing during the 'Mid-Pleistocene transition' (MPT), around 1 million years ago, when the dominant glacial/interglacial cyclicity changed from 40,000 to 100,000. It is why the European H2020 project “Beyond EPICA” (2019-2026) aims at drilling a 1.5 Myr ice core in the vicinity of Dome C in Antarctica. The science of the Beyond EPICA project partly relies on national funding and it is why we submit the following proposal to the ANR.
The aim of the current ToBE project is to develop new methods (both analytical and numerical), which will be used for an optimal interpretation of the ice from Beyond EPICA. The ToBE project will tackle the following scientific hypotheses:
· Is it possible to reconstruct climatic and environmental variations from the very old ice which exists at the base of the Antarctic ice sheet, despite of the ice alteration?
· Is it possible to date this very old ice, whose stratigraphic integrity is not guaranteed?
· Was this region of central East Antarctica stable in terms of ice flow, in particular the position of Dome C and the ice flow lines?
· Is it possible to determine the nature of the subglacial bedrock from inclusions present in the basal ice, as well as the timing when this bedrock was last uncovered by ice?
The ToBE project therefore gathers together four different French labs (IGE, LSCE, CEREGE and CRPG-Nancy) with scientists experts on various questions fundamental for the Beyond EPICA project: signal preservation, dating, ice flow and subglacial geology.