European ice core project EPICA receives the European Union Descartes Prize

Award for collaborative, transnational research

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. The Descartes Prize for Research is endowed by 1.36 million Euro in total and is awarded to up to four European teams each year for outstanding transnational projects in natural sciences and humanities. The EPICA project - carried out by twelve partners from ten European nations - was successful in retrieving past climate records of great impact for the assessment of our current climate change. Temperatures and greenhouse gas concentrations over up to the last 800,000 years could be measured. Furthermore, the ice cores allowed to study in detail the coupling of the northern and southern hemisphere.

The results of the EPICA project summarize the work of scientist from ten European nations including Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the U.K. and, their expertise in different branches of ice core research and glaciology. The German partner within EPICA is the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association, which was responsible for the deep drilling in Dronning Maud Land as well as for many of the analyses of this core. Prof. Heinrich Miller, deputy director of the Alfred Wegener Institute coordinated the EPICA project under the umbrella of the European Science Foundation (ESF). EPICA is funded by national contributions of the participating countries and by the European Union.

„Only in such a close collaboration between all European working groups has it been possible to carry out such a large-scale project logistically and scientifically“, says Dr. Hubertus Fischer, glaciologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute, who coordinated the EPICA application for the Descartes Prize. „Especially for young scientists and students EPICA is a unique possibility to perform top-level research together with colleagues from all over Europe and to establish their own scientific career. With the Descartes Prize we can intensify this tight networking and the close collaboration even further”, adds Dr. Fischer.