Deep ice cores: the need for going back in time

After the success of EPICA, the European Project for Ice coring in Antarctica which, at Dome C (East Antarctica) has provided access to climate and environmental records covering the last 800 ka (thousands of years), the ice core community is now engaged in the challenge to obtain older records. Obtaining a 1.5 million year (Ma) record of climate and greenhouse gases is one of the priorities of the International Partnerships in Ice Core Sciences (IPICS) largely motivated by the yet unexplained shift in climate cyclicity around the Mid-Pleistocene transition (MPT) around 1.2 Ma ago. From EPICA results and recently published articles, we further examine how such a 1.5 Ma old ice core will help, and is indeed indispensable, to depict and understand this transition.