To help answer the question of how long the buttressing Antarctic ice shelves might last in the face of warming and rising seas, an international initiative, including Dr.'s Mark Leckie and Rob DeConto, will turn to the geological record and recover sediment from regions beneath the floating Ross Ice Shelf and near the grounding zone of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet that were deposited during past times when it was warmer than today. These sediments hold environmental information that is key to our future but, until now, has been impossible to obtain.