It’s -30 degrees Celsius, even though the Sun hangs ceaselessly in the sky. Dressed in puffy, insulated suits and gloves thick enough to both hinder dexterity and preserve fingers, a team gamely tilts a drill barrel back to horizontal. With one smooth, firm motion, a two-meter-long cylinder of ice, bursting with history, is pushed free and slides down a temporary work bench.

Disturbed from its long slumber, this ice is destined for laboratories that will liberate whatever secrets it holds. There’s only one catch: it’s critical that nothing melts until it travels most of the way around the world.

This is not a futuristic scene from Jupiter’s enigmatic moon Europa, rather it’s a recent one from the closest thing you’ll find on Earth—the blank expanse of Antarctica’s interior. While this work was decidedly of this world, it would be extremely unfair to describe it as anything close to easy. Beyond allowing humans to work in the harsh Antarctic environment, how does ice buried by more than a kilometer of other ice at the South Pole end up in a lab 15,000 kilometers away in order to become scientific insight?