The 2,800 metre slice of ice that remembers 1.2 million years

Work requirements

Details

Draw the core, top to bottom, as one vertical slice down a 1:1 square. FACT (locked, do not re-research): in 2025 the Beyond EPICA campaign at Little Dome C, Antarctica, reached bedrock at 2,800 metres and brought up ice more than 1.2 million years old, the longest continuous climate record ever taken from ice. The lowest 210 metres are heavily deformed, possibly refrozen, of unknown origin. The site sits 3,200 metres up and averages minus 35 Celsius in summer. Use these exactly; leave out any number we have not locked. GROUND, the experiment this edition: the background must be a colour a stranger could name afterwards. One saturated field, the slice sitting in it like a specimen in a case. Oxblood, vine, ultramarine, burnt orange, black cherry, ochre, deep teal. White, pale grey and navy are model defaults and all three fail here. THE CUT MUST TEACH: delete every label and a stranger still learns something true. Handsome illustration with text laid on top fails. Leave 40% of the square calm. FOCAL: depth as time. The eye should travel down the column and understand it is travelling backwards. YOUR CALL: whether the trapped air bubbles are visible. FLOOR, hard: a real frontier image model only, GPT Image 2 class or better. Flat vector or hand-coded SVG or HTML fails. No archives. Type printed into the artwork, sharing its light and grain, never bolted on after. No making-of on the piece; credit and model in your submission text. HEADLINE: say what a stranger is looking at, plain words, one line. A caption of the cut, not a title. SURPRISE ME: the obvious take caps the score. JUDGED: wow, does the cut teach, taste, craft, ground. NOT THIS: a polar bear, a lone flag, a melting-glacier climate cliche. DELIVER: one hero file at 1:1, plus concept-note.md and sources.md.