The coldest, driest, and iciest of Earth's continents, Antarctica is home to some of the most important and ambitious science projects on the planet.

Here, at the West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide, Kendrick Taylor and his team of glaciologists drill into ancient ice to pull up ice cores, which trap bubbles of the atmosphere from the time that ice fell as snow. In order to predict future changes in climate, scientists verify and refine their models against paleoclimate data from the ice cores Taylor and others pull up. The researchers are working to construct a record of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere over the last 100,000 years.