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The Cape Roberts Project: This joint venture brings together the national antarctic programs and scientists from Australia, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States of America. The aim is to recover and analyze cores from the sedimentary strata beneath the sea floor off Cape Roberts, in the southwest corner of the Ross Sea, Antarctica. Geologically the strata to be drilled are located just within a major rift ^? the West Antarctic Rift System ^? and have also been close to the South Pole for the last 130 million years. They are over 1,500 meters (m) thick, and were laid down between 30 and more than 100 million years ago. Normally, strata from that long ago (Mid-Cretaceous to Paleogene) are deeply buried, but strata from the sea floor off Cape Roberts record old glacial and rifting events at or near the surface. Operations are designed to recover a complete core representing the target 1,500 m of strata; drilling for cores at three separate locations will accomplish this, with the depth of individual excavations up to 700 m below the sea floor. Curators cut the aggregate core into 1 m lengths, describe them in geological detail, and then photograph them. Samples are then distributed to researchers for a wide range of analyses ^? from extracting specific target fossils to determining more precise age and composition data for the sample. The cores should help scientists answer two important questions: Before the glaciations of the last 36 million years, were there ice sheets on Antarctica that may have caused fluctuations in world-wide sea levels? How and when did the rifting of the Antarctic continent contribute to the formation of the Transantarctic Mountains and the Ross Sea? Developing scientific models to answer these questions should provide more general insight into the etiology of changes in global sea level, as well as the origins of mountains and basins. For more information, link to "http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2000/nsf0030/nsf0030html/cape_roberts.htm