The West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) is losing mass at an accelerating rate, and its inland-deepening bed slope means it holds the potential to cause rapid sea-level rise which would have wide-reaching societal consequences. To predict how the WAIS may respond in the future and plan appropriate mitigation and adaption strategies, it is useful to constrain its past response to changing environmental conditions. Studying Early Miocene sediments from the Ross Sea outer continental shelf reveals that they were sourced from West Antarctica, proving the WAIS could expand far across the continental shelf and contribute to sea-level change millions of years earlier than previously proven. Such qualitative information is highly valuable, but to help quantify such reconstructions, a computational framework to predict the sediment provenance signature of a given ice sheet configuration is developed. This helps pinpoint the extent of Pliocene ice sheet retreat in the Wilkes Subglacial Basin. Studies of WAIS sediment provenance are also limited by uncertainty regarding subglacial geology. Samples obtained from beneath the WAIS offer new insights into its bedrock’s sediment provenance signature, as well as contributing to knowledge of how the WAIS entrains and transports sediments. Additionally, recent ice retreat has led to exposure of the first subaerial rock between two key outlets of the WAIS in the Amundsen Sea, which reveals the tectonic history of this rapidly changing region by defining the extent of crustal blocks and proving the existence of a hypothesised tectonic feature. Together, these projects advance knowledge of the history of the WAIS and provide the foundations for future studies of Antarctic sediment provenance. This will ultimately help constrain sea-level rise predictions.