Locating the 'oldest ice' in Antarctica

An ambitious project to retrieve a continuous record of Earth's atmosphere and climate stretching back 1.5 million years is officially "go". A European consortium will head to Antarctica later this year to begin the process of drilling deep into the continent's eastern ice sheet. The group's aim is to pull up a frozen core of material almost 3km long. The choice of location - at "Little Dome C" - followed three years of survey work, which included building a radar map of the bedrock under the ice.