BRUCE K. HUFF / Union-Tribune Scripps Institution of Oceanography researcher Ross Beaudette inspected an ice core sample taken from the South Pole in 1968 and prepared it for testing.

He's not interested in just any cube of frozen water. The stuff Beaudette is after was removed from a massive ice sheet last winter by researchers who endured weeks of whiteout conditions in the windiest, coldest and most remote place on Earth – Antarctica.

The ice then took nearly four months to reach the United States; it's now finally ready for distribution to scientific centers nationwide.

“It's just a long way from anywhere . . . and we get beat up by these storms that dump snow all around. Our working environment is definitely not great,” said Kendrick Taylor, chief scientist for the ice-drilling project, who is, ironically, based at the Desert Research Institute in Reno.

Graphic: From Antarctica to San Diego

Extracting the ice takes custom-made equipment, millions of dollars in funding and years of labor by dozens of people. Scientists said the effort is worth it because they eventually will be able to analyze ice that is at least 80,000 years old.

At places such as the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, Beaudette and other researchers will look for evidence of climate changes stored in the ice.

What they learn might help current efforts to combat global warming, which many scientists view as the planet's most pressing problem.

“We are one piece in this giant effort to figure out what happened in the past,” Beaudette said.

For about two months each year, teams of scientists set up camp near the South Pole and use a drill to penetrate ever deeper into the West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide. The sheet's surface area is about half the size of the continental United States.

BRUCE K. HUFF / Union-Tribune At his laboratory at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, researcher Ross Beaudette will look for evidence of climate changes stored in Antarctic ice.

Researchers cut the ice into meter-long sections and pack it into tubes for shipment because it would be too expensive to do full-scale analysis in the Antarctic. Their cargo then travels about 11,000 miles by air, sea and land to the United States' central ice-core freezer in Denver.

Beaudette, a researcher for prominent climate scientist Jeff Severinghaus, will soon request specific parts of the ice core for study.

If everything proceeds smoothly, the order will arrive at Beaudette's door courtesy of FedEx's next-day air service in a container that looks like an oversized cooler. The boxes, standard in the food industry, are engineered to keep contents at 0 degrees Fahrenheit for up to two days.

Beaudette will stash the specimens in a walk-in freezer at Scripps. When he needs information about climate conditions from some particular time in history, he'll wear a snowsuit and thin gloves – to give him feeling in his fingers – and brave the ice locker. Inside, he'll use a band saw to cut the ice cores into pieces the size of a pack of gum.

In the lab, he will use a complex series of measurements to study atmospheric gases trapped in air bubbles.

“Think of it like a time machine. You can say, 'What was the atmosphere like thousands of years ago?' and the air inside this ice will tell you that story,” Beaudette said.

The Antarctic extraction site was chosen by scientists who spent three work seasons – December and January – to pinpoint what they say is the world's best spot for finding a detailed record of how levels of greenhouse gases fluctuated over eons.

Full-scale drilling at the location started last winter.

Scientists from more than two dozen institutions and companies are involved in the project, as is the National Science Foundation, which is paying for the work. Researchers have received about $10 million in grants to conduct their initial experiments in the field and lab.

About 50 researchers camped in tents near the western ice divide in late 2007 and early 2008. Given all the time it takes to set up and take down the shelters and equipment, they are left with roughly 30 days a year for drilling.

In their spare time, team members skied, tossed footballs and flew kites – except during the frequent storms.

The whiteouts tried the patience of Anais Orsi, a graduate student at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography who was disappointed because those storms prevented the supply plane from delivering butter, sugar and M&Ms.

Orsi, a native of France, gravitated toward the ice work because she grew up hiking in the Alps and watching glaciers.

“Going to the same place year after year, you can see with your naked eye how fast (glaciers) are changing,” she said.

Orsi's fascination with nature is typical among scientists studying ice cores.

“They are interested in big-picture concepts of how the Earth works and what's going to happen in the future, but they also have an adventurous streak to them, too. None of them want to sit behind the computer forever,” Taylor said.

At the end of each drilling season, the ice cores are flown in a ski-equipped cargo plane for about 1,000 miles to McMurdo Station, one of the main research camps in Antarctica.

There, scientists put boxes of ice samples into a shipping container and transfer them to the American Tern, a ship designed to operate in ice-filled waters of the extreme south.

The vessel travels about 9,000 miles to Port Hueneme, north of Los Angeles. The port is best known as an entryway for bananas and vehicles, but once a year it accepts a load of ice from Antarctica.

The ice cores face their toughest test during the weeks at sea, said Mark Twickler at the University of New Hampshire, who is manager of the western ice divide project. The shipping containers must remain frozen solid even in the equatorial heat.

From Port Hueneme, the ice is hauled about 1,100 miles to the lab in Denver. One semi-truck carries the frozen load and an empty truck follows in case of a breakdown.

The nation's central science freezer – operated by the U.S. Geological Survey – contains about 15,000 ice samples extracted as early as 1958. The collection includes ice that was formed more than 400,000 years ago.

Details for each sample – when it was collected, where and by whom – are tracked in a database.

“It's an ice library. We have funny history books, that's all,” said Geoff Hargreaves, the ice laboratory's curator.

Back in Antarctica, work at the West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide is expected to continue into 2011.

Taylor and fellow researchers then hope to explain the prehistoric relationship between greenhouse gases and Earth's temperature.

“I am sure we will come up with an answer one way or another,” Taylor said.