APCOM

The research project EPICA (European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica) is one of this year's winners of the Descartes Prize for Research awarded by the European Union on the 12th of March in Brussels. This recognition is assigned to the most important investigations carried out all over Europe in the scientific and technological fields thanks to collaborations and partnerships.

Twelve partners from ten European nations took part in the project EPICA, which was financed by the EU and supported by the European Science Foundation. The Italian participation has been coordinated by Milano's Università Bicocca: its researchers worked with colleagues of other seven Italian universities, with Pisa's CNR (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche), with ENEA (Ente per le Nuove Tecnologie, l'Energia e l'Ambiente) and with INGV (Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia).

The project managed to retrieve very important past climate records, for the assessment of our current climate change. Temperatures and greenhouse gas concentrations up to the last 800,000 years have been measured through the drilling of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. The results have shown that the concentrations of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide have never been as high over the last 650,000 years as today, when human activities emit those gases artificially directly into the atmosphere.