The possibility of using ice cores for past climatic reconstructions is weil known from Greenland and Antarctica. In the Eurasian Arctic, the archipelago of Severnaya Zemlya is the most eastern one which is covered by a considerable ice cap, giving the opportunity to study regional climate signals from at least the whole Holocene period. The Academy of Sciences Ice Cap (Komsomolets Island) was chosen for a new deep ice core drilling because it is the thickest and coldest ice cap on Severnaya Zemlya. Drilling started in May 1999 within a joint project of the Alfred Wegener Institute (Germany), the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute, and the Mining Institute (Russia, St. Petersburg both). The device used was the KEMS-112 electromechanical ice core drill, the same type used at Vostok Station, Antarctica. A suitable drilling site was found by airborne radio-echo sounding data and SAR interferometry (ice thickness 720 m). In the 1999 season, the drilling reached a depth of 54 m. The poster presents first results from the study of this main core supplemented by invesrigations of snow pits and shallow cores. Visual stratigraphy, d180 profiles and glaciochemical parameters show the glacier's peculiarity that results from summer melting processes. Sharp signals obtained in snow of the last winter layer were smoothed in deeper layers by infiltrating water. Therefore stratigraphical observations are more difficult than those in glaciers without melting processes, but first isotope data indicate seasonal signals at least in layers with not much infiltration ice. The amount of summer melting ice, detectable by optical stratigraphical studies or density measurements. is an indication for the mean summer temperature. The correlation of summer melting ice with meteorological data will be discussed. Data from dielectric profiling (DEP) of the 54-m main core show considerable peaks in conductivity, which were interpreted as volcano events. Following the resulting chronology, the drilled core represents the last 200 years, with a mean accumulation rate of around 220 mm w.e.a-1. This value is in good accordance with older Russian data from the ice cap investigated. The deep ice-drilling project on Severnaya Zemlya will be continued in 2000.