Kate Selway is in a helicopter on Christmas Day, roaring over a vast expanse of snow-covered moving ice.

Beneath her, the Denman Glacier stretches across the Antarctic horizon as far as the eye can see.

Riddled with crevasses — giant gaping cracks in the ice — it is spectacular, wild and treacherous.

"It's really stunning," she recalls. "You can see ice is flowing and cracking as it does."

She had been looking forward to seeing this view since she arrived earlier in December, after two years of hard work and planning to get to one of the most remote places on Earth.

Even though she's been to Antarctica twice before, this is her first glimpse of the glacier from the air.

And this is no ordinary joyride. It's part of a project to discover what lies beneath, and how this mass of ice might behave in a warming world.