Two EPICA ice cores revealing 800,000 years of climate history: an overview.

Two deep ice cores had been drilled within the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica (EPICA). The first core from Dome C reached a depth of 3260 m covering a time period of about 800,000 years. The second core from Dronning Maud Land (DML), drilled at Kohnen-Station, reached 2774 m depth with an estimated age of approximately 300,000 years. Measurements of stable isotopes (oxygen-18, deuterium) reveal climatic variations over 8 glacial cycles. Synchronisation with the deep Greenland ice cores was possible by using the records of methane. A general correspondence was assessed between Dansgaard-Oeschger events in the North and their smoothed Antarctic counterparts, the so-called Antarctic Isotope Maxima (AIM). This was most evident in the DML ice core, as it shows an higher temporal resolution during the past 80,000 years than the Dome C ice core. However, such features with similar amplitude are also present in the deeper part of the Dome C ice core. It is likely that the interplay between obliquity and precession accounts for the variable intensity of interglacial periods in the ice-core records.