Time tunnel: why an Australian expedition is drilling through 2.6km of Antarctic ice

When it reaches about 2.6km beneath the Australian camp at Antarctica’s Little Dome C, the drill will hit ice with tiny pockets of air about 1.5m years old.

The last time those molecules were in the planet’s atmosphere, our human ancestor homo erectus was just working out how to harness fire to cook and stay warm.

Humans – us – were still more than a million years away from emerging on the earth. But it’s the world’s climate crisis, sown by homo sapiens, that is bringing science to this place.

Ice this old will unlock secrets of the Earth’s past and refine scientific understanding of what lies ahead as CO2 in the atmosphere from fossil fuel burning keeps rising.

At about 6pm on Tuesday, a team of 10 expeditioners from the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD) arrived at the site, 3,200 metres above sea level, after a 1,200km 19-day traverse from Casey station, to start drilling for the world’s oldest ice.

“We stopped about 500 metres before because we wanted to walk in and make sure we didn’t contaminate the drill site. It was minus 30 but the wind was light,” says…