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The article unveils the result of ANDRILL, a US$30 million international drilling project, in Antarctica. The drilling project in the western Ross Sea revealed that the country had more eventful climatic history and the new sediment core showed that the western part of the country went through a prolonged ice-free phases, offering scientists an idea of where the global warming might be heading. During the first two years of their drilling, they extracted two cores which contain some 1,200 metres of sediment from the seabed below the vast Ross Ice Shelf. Scientists believed that the specimen will provide them an uninterrupted 17-million-year record of the country's climatic past. The core revealed how ice retreated rapidly and quickly in the country.

The article presents information on a series of warm episodes, each of which lasted for several thousand years and occurred in Antarctica between 90,000 and 30,000 years ago. This bipolar seesaw have been driven by changes in the strength of the deep overturning circulation in the North Atlantic Ocean, but some have questioned how completely that process can account for the fine details of Antarctic warming events. The changes in the surface salinity gradient across the Antarctic Circumpolar Current were caused by the melting of icebergs discharged from the Arctic, which allowed increased heat transport to Antarctica by ocean eddies. This mechanism produces Antarctic warming of the magnitude observed in ice core records.