Bubbles of air trapped in ancient Antarctic ice, dating up to 2m years old, contain unknown information about Earth’s past climate

Traversing the world’s most unforgiving continent requires a generous measure of stoicism. “We took risks, we knew we took them,” wrote the Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott in 1912, trapped by a fierce blizzard in the days before he died, on an ill-fated expedition to reach the south pole. “Things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint.”

More than a century later, elemental extremes are still an unfortunate fact of life for scientists in Antarctica. Despite three seasons of bad luck which have delayed his team’s quest to find the world’s oldest ice, the paleoclimate scientist Dr Joel Pedro remains sanguine. He has good reason to be: this summer, after multiple setbacks and a relocation, a plan years in the making is finally coming to fruition.

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