Earth/Environment

How Antarctica got its ice, plus Chinese dust-ups and rising bird malaria in this week’s news

How Antarctica got its ice East Antarctica’s great ice sheet was already present — and bigger than today — by 14.7 million years ago, about a million years earlier than some scientists had thought. A 1,100-meter-long core drilled off the Antarctic coast in McMurdo Sound shows when ice affected the sediments settling on the seafloor.