It?s only fitting that this record was set by researchers from Wisconsin, where drilling a hole through the ice and dropping a fishing line passes for entertainment in the winter. Researchers from UW-Madison drilled to a record depth in the Antarctic ice ? nearly two miles. They set the U.S. Antarctic record on Jan. 28 with a hole they started drilling more than two years ago to retrieve ice cores for climate studies. The ice at the bottom of the hole is more than 40,000 years old, pocked by bubbles that contain what UW-Madison researcher Charles Bentley calls ?samples of the ancient atmosphere.?
Office of Strategic Communication