We traveled by helicopter from Ilulissat to five different sites along the ice sheet edge to collect rocks that came from under the ice sheet. (Once I got the hang of it I collected a few as well, doing my part for science.) In total, the team collected 300 rocks for their research project, about 650 pounds worth.

They’ll ship the rocks back to their lab at the University of Vermont, grind them up to separate the quartz, and send the extracted crystals for analysis at the Lawrence Livermore National Labs. If all goes well, the analysis will reveal the last time the rocks were exposed to cosmic rays from the sun, which would be the last time that the ice sheet was missing from that region of Greenland. (Video by Lisa Strong-Aufhauser.)

Despite its reputation for some of the coldest, fiercest weather on the planet, Antarctica is the hot spot for the little-known but expanding field of scientific ballooning, including NASA’s Ultra Long Duration Balloon Project. Scientific balloons are the cheapest, fastest way to carry payloads of up to 8,000 pounds to heights of up to 120,000 feet (36.5 km), where the earth’s atmosphere gives way to near space. Made of tough polyethylene film, the balloon material is as thin as ordinary kitchen plastic wrap. Once released, the droplet-shaped balloons expand to the size of a stadium as they ascend into the thinning air, where they can remain for weeks and even months.

Two things make Antartica an optimal site for scientific ballooning. The first is the circumpolar wind, a strong steady wind high in the stratosphere that carries balloons steadily and predictably around the globe. The second is the nightless Antarctic summers, which minimize the daily heating and cooling by the sun that causes balloons to lose altitude over time.

Balloon-borne projects include ATIC, a device to study cosmic rays; BESS, an antimatter detector; and ANITA, which uses the entire Antarctic ice sheet as a collecting aperture to detect high-energy neutrinos.