Deep in Time : An Anthropologic Exploration of the Values of Antarctica’s Ice Core. 

Abstract

In the history of Antarctica’s science, Ice Core Science (ICS) holds a special place. Since the 80s, it is one of the main research fields as it allows scientists to connect with our earth’s past and future climate with the unavoidable change our society will face. Beyond EPICA and the DEEPICE training programme are leading projects as they build a legacy for ICS in Antarctica. The purpose of this paper is to examine how ICS and its infrastructure participate in the maintenance of Antarctica as a place of science, as a territory-laboratory. I will be presenting the preliminary results of a multi-situated ethnography on scientific communities working in and on Antarctica. For this presentation, I will be focusing on a field work started in 2023 with DEEP-ICE’s PhD students. A first round of interviews led me to a participating observation in a glaciology laboratory, following a PhD candidate during their analysis. Early 2024, a series of follow-up interview is planned to complete my dataset and complete the history of DEEPICE. Once retrieved, the value of an ice core sample is directly connected to its possibility of collecting data from a specific time frame, and by that, making new scientific questions emerge. The value of Antarctica’s sample is shown by the constant care it has received. Gestures and technic are specifically tested and repeated in preparation of Antarctica’s sample, even if they later disappears from published papers. Communication surrounding Beyond EPICA and DEEPICE highlights the challenges faced by scientists to retrieved ice core, promoting ICS, the excellence of Antarctica’s research while securing funds. The ambition to form fifteen PhD candidates shows the necessity of transmission and heritage, and the excellence expected to perform the future analysis. The samples are valuable not only as an object of science, or because they contain unique data set. They allow our society to exist in different timescales and to overcome human temporalities.  With ICS, Antarctica enters in a new era : the heroic age of time exploration. ICS, with its heroic narrative and its possibility to understand past climate has protected Antarctica and its intrinsic value, a place of science and an object to be studied. The DEEPICE training program is an example of the politics of maintenance surrounding Antarctica. The increase of tourism, Ice Memory (where Antarctica is becoming a sanctuary, a living archive) and the development of drilling technic and a new era of research (blue ice) are displaying new questions about the future of ICS and its role in maintaining Antarctica as a place of science. Once the oldest ice will be reached, what new scientific quest will take part of Antarctica’s maintenance ?