A team of six researchers, including two UVM scientists, have studied a 30-foot-long core of ice and sediment from the Transantarctic Mountains in Antarctica. They estimate that the ice may be up to five million years old—perhaps the oldest ice ever discovered. Scientists around the world are searching for ever-older ice to get a deeper view of the planet’s past climates, a crucial tool in understanding and modeling climate change today.

UVM geoscientists Paul Bierman and Lee Corbett studied the sediment in their on-campus laboratory, UVM’s National Science Foundation-supported Community Cosmogenic Facility. The results were published in the journal Cryosphere and covered in the news section of the journal Nature.

Bierman is a professor in the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, and Corbett, who completed her PhD at UVM in 2016, is the manager of the cosmogenic lab.