 So here we are at Lake George and we're on the floor of the the lake. It doesn't look like a lake at the moment but sometimes there's water right across this area. At the moment the water is well to the south of us even though we've had good rain in the last few months. So we've had this research project going for several years to investigate the long history of Lake George and one of the sources of information on the long history of the lake well beyond human history is to take sediment cores from beneath the floor of the lake and examine the sediment particularly for fossil pollen which tells us about the vegetation that was growing at this site at times back in this case a few million years. Today we're at the northern end of the lake we're drilling a hole that's gone down more than 80 meters. We're intersecting sediments that we think are probably more than four million years old and when we process these sediment cores in the lab and extract the pollen grains and identify them we'll be able to say what the vegetation was like around Lake George more than four million years ago and also say something about the climate at the time because vegetation is very strongly related to climate. Four million years ago we think the rainfall was probably much higher around Lake George and so we know from previous drilling that we've done out here that intersected sediments as old as three million years we know at three million years ago there were some kinds of rainforest trees growing around the lake and the rainfall was much much higher than it is today and we expect that probably something similar was happening back four million years but let's see when we get the sediment cores out. The type of vegetation and the climate and the kind of sediment that we're drilling through helps us build up a picture of the environment at various times in the past including how deep the lake was or even if there was a lake and so on. So it's all part of understanding the history of the region, the landscape, the past climate changes.