Next week, if all goes according to plan, a small mountain of snow will be melted, repeatedly sterilised and then injected in a high-pressure stream of near-boiling water to clear a bore-hole through the two miles of the ice-sheet.
The cause of this cold lurch was seemingly settled some time ago when Wallace Broecker, a Columbia University geochemist, suggested that a North American ice sheet collapsed, flooding the Atlantic with fresh water, which interrupted the normal circulation of the Gulf Stream.