This team of scientists are drilling deep into an ice sheet, 650 metres in fact, to extract a piece of Antarctic ice core.
Their tent is pitched in the isolated, hostile and uninhabited icy landmass of the Skytrain Ice Rise in Antarctica.
Probing the icy depths of the continent, these scientists from the University of Cambridge and the British Antarctic Survey are working to understand what makes Antarctica's ice sheets so vulnerable.
The drill has extracted large 80cm chunks of ice core, which are then cut for further analysis.
Scientists here spent three months drilling between 2018 and 2019.
The extracted ice cores contain air bubbles, which are a direct sample of 200 year old atmosphere in Antarctica.
Dr Thomas Bauska, a research fellow at British Antarctic Survey, demonstrates how an ice core sample melts and releases bubbles of air.
"What I have here is an ancient ice core sample in this little cup and if you can hear it, now with the microphone, you might hear the bubbles popping and that's actually air being released that had previously been captured in the bubbles for almost 200 years, so what I'm breathing in now is probably the purest air you can ever breathe in."
Air bubbles are released once the ice is immersed in water and when the ice melts amid warmer surrounding temperatures.
Dr Bauska says their ice core data indicates that levels of greenhouse gases were lower in the past than today.
"The concentration of the gases like carbon dioxide, methane, all the greenhouse gases that are causing global warming today, were a lot lower in the past, and what our ice core data show is that the world we live in now has unprecedented levels of greenhouse gases."
With a mean annual surface temperature of minus 26 degrees Celsius, extracting ice cores in Antarctica was a physically challenging and slow process for the researchers involved.
"So, the first thing you have to do is of course drill the ice core, which in some cases can take as little as a few months, and sometimes our deepest sized cores which are actually nearly 2 miles long, can take years to drill. That's partially because you can only stay in Antarctica and work for just a few months at a time, so it's a huge effort to drill the ice core in the first place, then of course you want to get back home safely."
Aircraft from the British Antarctic Survey and British Royal Air Force were used in the ice core extraction and needed for timely and cool transportation.
Some ice core samples were kept in tents at the Skytrain Ice Rise with the sub-zero temperatures being optimal for longer-term storage.
As well as air composition, once analysed, the ice core samples showed scientists an historical insight into patterns of major ice loss spanning thousands of years.
Dr Amy King is a scientist at the British Antarctic Survey.
"One of the key things we see in the ice core is that 8,000 years ago we saw the ice elevation of the Antarctic ice sheet in our area go down by over 400 metres in just 200 years. So, this is a massive event where loads of ice was lost very quickly in terms of climate."
Past warming events could indicate how melting ice sheets could behave in the future says Dr King.
"This is really interesting to use because we had climate models telling us that this kind of thing could happen in the future with our current climate warming, but we'd never seen direct evidence of this in an ice core to prove this is how the ice sheet could behave, so this really puts into perspective what could happen to the ice sheet in the future. The Antarctic ice sheet now, is in a very similar state to where it was just before this ice loss event 8,000 years ago so we're seeing similar levels of warming and the similar behaviour in how the ice sheet is operating. So that's why we need to be perhaps a little concerned about how if we keep emissions higher and temperatures higher that we may be very realistically coming close to one of these major ice loss events again."
Through their exhibit at the Royal Summer Science exhibit, the team of researchers hope to raise awareness of the changes occurring in Antarctica and the implications for people around the world.
