Inside the core buffer – three shipping containers welded together with a door at each end. The top of the containers is about 2 m under the snow, and this allows us to maintain a temperature inside around -35°C during the height of the local summer, and around -55°C during the winter. In the foreground are the racks of core troughs where we will place freshly drilled brittle zone cores, uncut after drilling, to allow them to relax for a year before further handling, cutting and bagging. At the far end of the container are the full boxes of core ready for transfer to the long-term storage at Concordia Station – each box contains six 1 m long cores and weighs around 50 kg
