News
It's a scene that's been repeated for the last several summers in the Denver metro area: People bundled in thick coats, wool hats and heavy boots – as if ready for an arctic adventure – step into what appears to be a white-walled workshop. There are table saws and planers and less familiar instruments, including a device that sports electrodes.
This is the ice core processing room for the National Ice Core Laboratory at the Denver Federal Center in Lakewood, Colo., with an ambient temperature of minus 24 degrees Celsius.
It's a freezing cold day inside the National Ice Core Laboratory (NICL) in Denver, Colo., as it is every day of the year. That's because the NICL is a facility for storing and studying ice cores recovered from the polar regions of the world. It's minus 23.3 degrees Celsius (minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit) inside, so everyone is bundled up in ski parkas, insulated gloves and boots. And, saws are buzzing, as scientists from all over the U.S. are measuring and cutting pieces of precious Antarctic glacier ice to take back to their labs for research.
It took a month to prepare for a week's worth of work at the National Ice Core Laboratory (NICL) in Lakewood, Colo. It was a long time in coming.
But the final sections of ice core from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Divide were sliced and diced in mid-June, with samples of ancient ice destined for labs across the country to analyze the paleoclimate record. About 75 meters of ice were processed through NICL after the hole was deepened this past field season.
The Fall 2011 In-Depth Newsletter is now available online at https://icecores.org/indepth/
In the Fall 2011 issue:
- Getting to the Bottom: NICL Team Processes Deepest Ice from WAIS Divide Project
- Peter Rejcek (The Antarctic Sun)
- NICL Update - Evaporative Condenser Unit
- Betty Adrian (NICL)
- CH2M HILL Polar Services Wins Arctic Contract
- Replicate Ice Coring System
- Joe Souney (Ice Drilling Program Office)
- NICL Use and Ice Core Access
We are interested in project stories and news from the ice coring community. Please contact us if you are interested in submitting a story or news item to In-Depth.
Mick Sternberg had literally made the same measurement a thousand times before. But this meter-long ice core was perhaps just a little more special. He double-checked his numbers on the final length, stood back, and rechecked again.
"No reason to rush through this," he said under his breath, which steamed out in the freezing temperatures of the National Ice Core Laboratory's processing room.
After all, this last section of ice, drilled from near the bottom of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) at a depth of about 3,331 meters, had been waiting around for a while. Probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 55,000 to 60,000 years
The Spring 2011 In-Depth Newsletter is now available online at https://icecores.org/indepth/
In the Spring 2011 issue:
- Searching for Ancient Air on the Taylor Glacier
- Thomas Bauska (Oregon State University)
- The Ultimate Classroom: Fieldwork at Allan Hills, Antarctica Provides Lifetime of Learning
- Nicole Spaulding (University of Maine)
- NICL Update
- Betty Adrian (NICL)
- A Story Captured in Ice
- Daniel J. Vaccaro (Regis University)
- WAIS Divide Ice Core Update
- Upcoming Meetings, Ice Core Working Group Members, Recently Funded Projects
We are interested in project stories and news from the ice coring community. Please contact us if you are interested in submitting a story or news item to In-Depth.
Talk about a road trip.
Three semi-trailer trucks, each pulling 20-foot-long refrigeration containers, rolled into Denver on March 15 after a 24-hr trip across the southwest corner of the country from Port Hueneme, Calif.
The cargo: ice. Lots of it - about 43 pallets' worth. But this isn't ice for some fancy cocktail party. The trucks from California had hauled Antarctic ice cores to the National Ice Core Laboratory (NICL) in Lakewood, Colo.
It was the final leg of a journey that had covered some 11,000 miles.
The Fall 2010 In-Depth Newsletter is now available online at https://icecores.org/indepth/
In the Fall 2010 issue:
- Ice Core Paleoclimate Records from Combatant Col, British Columbia
- Peter Neff (University of Washington)
- Subglacial Antarctic Environments: The Other Deep Biosphere
- Brent Christner (Louisiana State University)
- On the Line - Researchers spend summer in deep-freeze to slice and dice WAIS Divide ice core
- Peter Rejcek (The Antarctic Sun)
- WAIS Divide Ice Core Update
- Upcoming Meetings, Ice Core Working Group Members, Currently Funded Projects
We are interested in project stories and news from the ice coring community. Please contact us if you are interested in submitting a story or news item to In-Depth.
It's midsummer in Denver, and the city has been baking under a heat wave for a couple of months. But in one small corner of the sprawling Denver Federal Center campus in the nearby suburb of Lakewood, about a dozen people are bundled up in thickly insulated Carhartt jumpsuits, wool caps, scarves and gloves.
Congratulations to the NEEM team reaching the bottom of the Greenland Ice Sheet! Below is a message from Jim White regarding upcoming opportunities at NEEM. Please contact Jim directly if you have interest working on these upcoming samples. To learn more about NEEM, visit their website at http://neem.nbi.ku.dk/.
From Jim White:
Dear Colleagues,
The NEEM ice core in north-central Greenland has reached bedrock. NEEM is an international ice coring project co-funded by fourteen nations. The US, via NSF-OPP Arctic, is a major partner in the project.
Rock coring and basal ice sampling, including biological sampling, is scheduled to happen in 2012 at NEEM. It would be great to have US participation in this, and we are looking for US scientists who might have an interest in working on any aspect of the basal ice and/or the basal rock material.
If you are interested, please contact:
Jim White
email: james 'dot' white 'at' colorado.edu
phone: 303 492 7909