Wellington  - There is Scotch on the rocks down in Antarctica and a team of New Zealand scientists hope to lay their hands on it - purely in the interests of science, you understand.

Al Fastier, who will lead an expedition to the white continent in the coming southern hemisphere summer, hopes to get hold of a bottle or two of rare McKinlay and Co whisky that has been on ice for 100 years.

But despite a liking for a dram after a hard day's work in the freezing Antarctic temperatures, he will not get to taste it.

Fastier's mission is part of an Antarctic Heritage Trust programme to conserve and protect huts used by British explorers Ernest Shackleton and Captain Robert Falcon Scott in their expeditions early last century.

Fastier identified two crates of the whisky under Shackleton's hut at Cape Royds on an earlier visit nearly three years ago, but they were too deeply embedded in the ice to reach.

They were all that was left of 25 crates known to be included in Shackleton's supplies for his unsuccessful 1909 expedition to the South Pole.

Fastier hopes that special drilling equipment will make it easier in February to retrieve a bottle for close inspection.

Under international treaty rules, items can only be removed from Antarctica for examination and conservation and then returned to remain as part of the region's heritage.

Although Whyte and Mackay, the company that now owns the McKinlay brand, told an English newspaper that it would like a sample of the whisky to test and try to replicate the taste, Fastier told the German Press Agency dpa Tuesday that no formal request had been made.

If it were, the New Zealand government would have to approve the process for taking a sample, he said.

Either way, Fastier will not be sipping it.

"One of the exciting things for me is the mystique about it all," he said.

"It's nice to imagine how it may taste - the peaty flavours and all the rest of it. In some ways if you actually taste it you destroy a lot of that mystique and unknown. It's important to maintain that." (dpa)