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When it comes to understanding what’s happening with our climate, scientists have an abundance of hard cold facts at their fingertips in the form of ice cores that are cut, organized, and stored at the National Ice Core Facility located at the Denver Federal Center. Assistant Curator Richard Nunn refers to the ice cores as “ancient time capsules.”
“They are the best record of what our Earth’s climate has been doing over the last 850,000 years,” he says.
“If we want to understand what the climate’s doing now with human activity, the best way to answer that is to really understand the natural cycles that our climate goes through, and ice cores give us that picture better than anything else on the planet.”
Scientists travel to some of the harshest and coldest places on Earth to collect ice cores, which are typically drilled 200 to 300 meters deep into the ice, though some extend as far as two miles.
This past summer, National Science Foundation COLDEX welcomed 12 undergraduate students from 11 institutions around the country as part of the Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU), a program that pairs undergraduate students with NSF-funded researchers every summer. While many students worked with scientists either in labs or remotely, three undergraduate students were invited to the U.S. National Science Foundation Ice Core Facility (ICF) in Lakewood, Colorado, to learn more about ice cores and contribute to the core processing line (CPL) that frequently takes place at the ICF. For COLDEX, the CPL is one of the most important parts of the process of handling an ice core: it’s when researchers from across the country carefully study and cut ice cores collected in the field to take back to their labs for further analysis.
The world’s largest repository for ice cores is set to get an upgrade: its refrigeration system is switching from banned coolants that can harm the ozone layer to a more environmentally friendly technology.
“The ultimate replacement of refrigerants with ozone-friendly solutions is a very important, legally driven issue,” says Tas van Ommen, a climate scientist based in Hobart, Australia, who is the co-chair of the International Partnerships in Ice Core Sciences.
Looking for your next read? How about a mystery that delves into a past that perhaps no one has ever heard before? There’s a library that holds those stories — stories of how our planet might have looked hundreds of thousands of years ago before humans existed. You don’t need special permission to enter this library, but you will need a reservation — and a parka. It’s -40 degrees inside, where these books, so to speak, are kept.
Theo Carr is our “librarian” today as we enter the National Science Foundation’s Ice Core Facility (NSF-ICF) in Lakewood, Colorado, just west of Denver. The building holds the largest archive of ice in the world — containing some 25,000 meters — collected from the Arctic to Antarctica. Staff, like Carr, are tasked with safely and securely storing ice cores from the glaciated regions of the world.
Much like reading tree rings, scientists can read the past (and even predict the future!) using ice cores cut and transported from extreme places such as Antarctica and Greenland. So, what is the ancient ice telling us? And how is this ice different from what we might pull out of a freezer?
On February 9, the Denver Museum of Nature & Science held a virtual field trip to the NSF-ICF.
Watch the recording from the virtual field trip and hear Assistant Curator Richard Nunn talk about the NSF-ICF and ice cores!
LAKEWOOD, Colo. — Princess Elsa isn’t moving. Maybe because she’s inanimate. Or she takes her role in Disney’s movie “Frozen” too literally. The fact she’s a cutout could explain it.
Or maybe it’s because Elsa, stored in the nation’s premier ice core laboratory, a freezer that holds more than 22,000 meters worth of core samples, lives in a room kept at -36 C.
“The ice cores are the best record that we have of natural climate change,” Richard Nunn, assistant curator at the National Science Foundation Ice Core Facility, said during a recent visit. “To the best of my knowledge, this is the largest single collection of ice cores in the world.”
LAKEWOOD, Colo. — There is a kind of polar process happening in the parking lots on the Front Range.
Over time, snow turns to ice. And the icier a pile of snow gets, the harder and denser it becomes. Which means the longer it sits, the more energy it will take to melt it.
Those parking lot glaciers have now been sitting around for more than a month. That is a long time but there’s some ice in Denver that formed more than 400,000 years ago.
IN THIS EPISODE OF THE ATLAS OBSCURA PODCAST, we learn how scientists in Denver, Colorado, store and conduct tests on miles of ice core samples dating back hundreds of thousands of years.
Research suggests some ice caps grew during past periods of warming
Woods Hole, MA – Greenland may be best known for its enormous continental scale ice sheet that soars up to 3,000 meters above sea level, whose rapid melting is a leading contributor to global sea level rise. But surrounding this massive ice sheet, which covers 79% of the world’s largest island, is Greenland’s rugged coastline dotted with ice capped mountainous peaks. These peripheral glaciers and ice caps are now also undergoing severe melting due to anthropogenic (human-caused) warming. However, climate warming and the loss of these ice caps may not have always gone hand-in-hand.
In September 2013, a major storm dumped a year’s worth of rain on the city of Boulder, Colo., in just 2 days. Walls of water rushed down the mountainsides into Boulder Creek, causing it to burst its banks and flood nearby streets and buildings.
Instead of trying to escape the flood, Tyler Jones, a biogeochemist at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) in Boulder, drove directly toward it. His motive? Mere meters from the overflowing creek, a large freezer housed the lab’s collection of precious ice cores.