Why would anyone brave hand-numbing cold, icy winds and rough seas - sometimes working through the night - to dig up mud from the Antarctic seabed?
That is what an international team of particularly adventurous researchers did earlier this year in the remote Antarctic Peninsula, on a mission aiming to reveal centuries of scientific secrets about the Southern Ocean.
Scientists around the world will now share and analyse these precious mud samples to work out how human activity - including a century of industrial whaling - affected Antarctica and the rest of our planet.
The research is part of a global effort to understand the relationship between the ocean and the climate.
Researchers used a special coring drill - a bit like a huge apple-corer - tethered to a research ship, to drill at depths of up to 500m.
