PHOTO BY FIRSTNAME LAST CREDIT TK IT WAS DEC. 23, our eighth night in a row of working the night shift in the drill tent. We were trying to finish drilling the longest ice core ever drilled in the Allan Hills of Antarctica. Radar data indicated that the bottom was somewhere around 300 meters down,and we had passed that markyesterday.The previous night, I had felt so confident that I started playing Europe’s “The Final Countdown” on the sound system while we got set up. But now I was losing hope that we would reach our goal of bedrock by Christmas. I was an ice core handler on the COLDEX 2025-26 Allan Hills field team. We had been living in tents on the ice sheet for just over a month, drilling cores in minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit weather. NSF COLDEX, the National Science Foundation Center for Oldest Ice Exploration, is dedicated to finding and analyzing the oldest ice possible. Specifically, the center is interested in the content of the air bubbles trapped within — tiny time capsules that provide important information about the climate millions of years ago. COLDEX is part of an international effort to extend the ice core record back to more than 1 million years ago.When the ice core community conceived the Oldest Ice Challenge in 2004, the oldest ice core ever drilled was only about 800,000 years old. Taking that beyond 1 million years would uncover data from a time when climate cycles were shorter, with ice ages about once every 40,000 years, compared to the more recent 100,000-year cycle. Even more importantly, during interglacial periods earlier than 1 million years ago, our planet was very warm — even warmer than today. Greenhouse gas data from back then will help us understand how our climate could change in the near future, which could lead to new strategies for improving human resilience. Several teams worldwide took up the challenge. Founded in 2021 as a multi-institutional NSF Science and Technology Center headquartered at Oregon State University, COLDEX is the United States’ entry. Fall 2026 43
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