One of the things I love about working on ice is it's actually just visually very beautiful. The Antarctic is a beautiful and exceptional place to work. Much of what I do is to try to understand changes in climate over the last hundreds to thousands to even hundreds of thousands of years. An ice core is a continuous section of ice drilled into a glacier or an ice sheet. We're sending this instrument down which is just a cutting tool and the thing goes down a meter at a time. You bring it up and now you have these long tubes of ice. Drilling an ice core is kind of like a time machine. You can go back and find out what was the atmosphere like 50,000 years ago. It's snow that has fallen and then it's compressed trapping the atmosphere. You can count the layers in ice cores like you can count tree rings and that means that you can actually determine when certain events in climate happened within a few years.
An ice core is a continuous section of ice drilled into a glacier or an ice sheet. Additionally, ice core drilling can provide climate information over many hundred thousand years, which help people to understand past climates. By counting the layers in ice cores, the time of some certain events in climate happened within a few years can be determined.
