Why are ice cores so important? What do they tell us?
Evidence of past climate change can be found in tree rings, glacial deposits, caves and corals. But ice cores are the most robust archive of past climate, providing a baseline of how the climate system has changed. The ice has actually captured atmosphere, precipitation, temperature, wind speeds, chemistry providing more data than even the best human records, which focused for decades primarily on temperature. Cores from around the world allow us to correlate data from different time periods. Year-by-year comparisons allow us to find out whether, for instance, an abrupt climate change event in Antarctica occurred before or after an event in the Arctic. That’s very important, because it helps determine what actually triggered the event, what we might call a precursor. Then if we start to see change happening in that location, it means we may expect that sequence of events to continue. Is global warming increasing the urgency to retrieve ice cores? Absolutely. It’s the equivalent of havi
