Public Release: 

Researchers capture oldest ice core ever drilled outside the polar regions

The 1,000+ feet of ice may contain more than half a million years of climate history

Ohio State University

New Orleans--The oldest ice core ever drilled outside the polar regions may contain ice that formed during the Stone Age--more than 600,000 years ago, long before modern humans appeared.

Researchers from the United States and China are now studying the core--nearly as long as the Empire State Building is tall--to assemble one of the longest-ever records of Earth's climate history.




"The ice cores actually demonstrate that warming is happening, and is already having detrimental effects on Earth's freshwater ice stores," Thompson said.

Earth's largest supply of freshwater ice outside of the Arctic and Antarctica resides in Tibet--a place that was off limits to American glaciologists until 20 years ago, when Ohio State's Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center (BPCRC) began a collaboration with China's Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research. There, glaciologist Yao Tandong secured funding for a series of joint expeditions from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.


The name "Third Pole" refers to high mountain glaciers located on the Tibetan Plateau and in the Himalaya, in the Andes in South America, on Kilimanjaro in Africa, and in Papua, Indonesia--all of which have been studied by the Ohio State research team.


"The stable isotopic records that we've obtained from five ice cores drilled across the Third Pole document climate changes over the last 1,000 years, and contribute to a growing body of evidence that environmental conditions on the Third Pole, along with the rest of the world, have changed significantly in the last century," Thompson said. "Generally, the higher the elevation, the greater the rate of warming that's taking place."


"There are over 46,000 mountain glaciers in that part of the world, and they are the water source for major rivers," Thompson said.







"The more we study the different components of the environment of the Third Pole, the better we understand climate change and its linkages among Earth's three polar regions," Yao said.



Funding for the Guliya project was provided by a grant from the National Science Foundation's Paleo Perspectives on Climate Change Program, the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Frontier Research of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Lonnie Thompson, (614) 292-6652;
Ellen Mosley-Thompson, (614) 292-6662;
Yao Tandong:

Written by Pam Frost Gorder, 614-292-9475;

Editor's note: Images are available to accompany the story via, and a video is available at
