The ice cores were drilled from 2.8km down in the Antarctic ice sheet, and they arrived at the British Antarctic Survey at the start of the summer.
Over the last few weeks, a team has been working round the clock to study the ice. The only way to do that is to destroy the precious samples – by melting them.
The BBC’s Rebecca Morelle is with scientists as they melt the last few ice cores for analysis – these are the very oldest, at least 1.5 million years old.
The project to collect and study the world’s oldest ice has taken years of work and hundreds of people. The samples taken from the South Pole will give an environmental record of over a million years.
