The ice man

摘要

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1992, Jean-Robert Petit had every reason to feel anxious. He was living in the most remote place on Earth, in a research station run and supplied by ... the Soviets. High up on the Antarctic plateau, atop 4 kilometres of ice, Vostok is no holiday camp. It holds the world record for the lowest reported temperature (-89.6℃) and it takes two weeks to haul supplies there by land. But from these frozen depths has come an unprecedented record of climate change stretching back hundreds of thousands of years. The Soviets began drilling there decades ago. And Petit, from the Laboratory of Glaciology and Geophysics of the Environment in Grenoble, was among the first Western experts to go there to analyse the ice.