Inside the laboratory, melting the oldest ice in the world

The icy nuclei were drilled 2.8 km down into the ice sheet in Antarctica and they arrived in the British Antarctica study in early summer.

In the last few weeks, the team has been working around the clock to study the ice. The only way to do this is to destroy precious samples – by melting them.

Rebecca Morel of the BBC is with scientists as they melt the last few ice cores for analysis – these are the oldest, at least 1.5 million years.

The project for the collection and study of the most ice in the world took years and hundreds of people. The samples taken from the South Pole will give an ecological record of over a million years.