Spring 2008

From the early 1950's through the mid-1960's, U.S. polar ice coring research was led by two U.S. Army Corps of Engineers research labs: the Snow, Ice, and Permafrost Research Establishment (SIPRE), and later, the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL).

Under the auspices of the Greenland-Denmark-United States Joint Committee, the Nordic/ Baltic Environment Science & Technology Hub—based out of the U.S. Embassy Copenhagen—sponsored a unique Arctic science trip for Danish, Greenlandic, and U.S. high school science students and teachers to Greenland's inland ice sheet.

The third season for the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Divide Ice Core Project ended on 05 February 2008. The inaugural season of deep drilling with the Deep Ice Sheet Coring (DISC) Drill went very well and core quality was excellent.

It's not every day that an actual segment of the GISP2 core from Summit, Greenland, goes on the road to excite and inform the public about polar research and the current IPY, but that's just what happened in March 2008, as POLAR-PALOOZA kicked off its continuing tour of more than 20 communities across America with a series of events at the National Geographic Society in Washington DC

The goal of NEEM (North Greenland Eemian ice drilling) is to obtain a complete ice core record of the climate from the last interglacial period, called the Eemian, in Greenland. In Greenland, the Eemian was several degrees C warmer than today.

As the International Polar Year continues we were honored to have Tony Gow visit us once again at the University of New Hampshire for our featured article on "Polar Ice Coring and IGY". I first met Tony in 1985 when he visited us to look at the stratigraphy of the Dominion Range ice core we had just collected.