Imagine cutting into a wall of ice and finding tiny bubbles that contain air from a world long gone. In Antarctica, snow falls, settles, and is slowly pressed into ice. Layer after layer, the ice can preserve clues about the atmosphere above it. That is why an international team has been drilling at a site called Little Dome C, on the high Antarctic ice sheet. The project is called Beyond EPICA, or Beyond EPICA Oldest Ice. The project website says that the team has collected a new ice core reaching at least 1.2 million years into the past. The European Commission's project page describes the recovered core as 2,800 metres long and says that the drill reached the bedrock beneath the ice sheet. These numbers are hard to picture. A core is a long, narrow cylinder, but scientists do not treat it as one single block. They study it layer by layer, because each part records a different period in Earth's history.