The glacial drillings bring us important information on the past climates, in particular through the analyses of enclosed air bubbles and which are authentic samples of the past atmospheres. The deep drilling which goes the deepest in the past is the one from the european EPICA project with its 800,000 years old ice. But scientists seek to go further back in time, to document the Mid-Pleistocene Transition (MPT) which occurred between 1.2 and 0.8 million of years into the past and during which the large glacial cycles with a period of ~100,000 years were born (Fischer et al., 2013). It is why the european H2020 project Beyond EPICA (2019-2026) was born and aims at drilling a 1.5 million years ice core at the Little Dome C (LSC) site. With its relatively low ice thickness, it is improbable that the LDC site will allow to go more than 1.5 million years back in time with a sufficient temporal resolution (Chung et al., 2023a, b). The current project aims at studying the basal ice layer in Antarctica, to determine its role in the large scale dynamics of the ice sheet and to determine and characterize drilling sites allowing to go further back in time (2 million years or more). This old period has encountered greenhouse gases concentrations as high or potentially higher than the present and we want to study the climate dynamics as well as the East Antarctic ice sheet dynamics during this period. A potentially interesting site, called North Patch, has already been determined and will have to be confirmed (Parrenin et al., 2017; Chung et al., 2023a, b). After a geophysical campaign and some numerical modeling, a deep drilling and on-site analyses will be carried out with innovative techniques. The technical developments for the deep drilling and for the on-site analyses of the ice will be inspired by developments currently happening in the laboratories but they will require adaptation to be deployed on-site. Our project relies on 4 pillars: - Radar sounding of the ice sheet, - modeling of the age of the ice and determination of a drilling site, - Construction and deployment of a rapid access drilling, - Ice analysis, dating of the ice and reconstruction of climatic parameters to study this old and warm period. Our project is NOT a concurrent to the Beyond EPICA project, but is rather situated upstream of a future European deep drilling project which will aim to go further back in time than 1.5 million years. Indeed, the aim of our project is not to perform all possible analyses on a large diameter ice core, but just to qualify a potential drilling site and to deduce the first information on the dynamics of this old past period.