Greenland ice core photos

An international team of researchers including several from CU-Boulder who have been analyzing ice cores from the Greenland ice sheet going back in time more than 100,000 years believe the last interglacial period may be a road map of sorts regarding the future climate of Earth as temperatures and greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide continue to rise. The team drilled through more than 1.5 miles of ice to retrieve climate information locked in the cores, which were formed by annual layers of compressed snow and which show the Eemian interglacial period was significantly warmer than today.

A team of researchers involving CU-Boulder is exhuming ice cores from Greenland, shown here, to better understand the past interglacial period known as the Eemian. Photo courtesy Tyler Jones, University of Colorado

A Hercules LC-130 plane was used to transport people and equipment to and from the NEEM deep ice core project in Greenland that began in 2007. Photo courtesy Tyler Jones, University of Colorado

Fourteen different country flags flying at the NEEM ice core site, one for each nation involved in the project. Photo Courtesy Tyler Jones, University of Colorado

NEEM research team members slept in Quonset huts on the ice known as “weather ports” during the frigid Greenland nights. Photo courtesy Tyler Jones, University of Colorado

CU-Boulder doctoral student Tyler Jones with Mirena Olaizola of the Centre for Ice and Climate at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen check the settings on an instrument used to control the deep ice core drill. Photo courtesy Tyler Jones, University of Colorado

Lasers are used to measure water stable isotopes and atmospheric gas bubbles in the ice cores from Greenland, shown here, to better understand past variations in climate. Photo courtesy Tyler Jones, University of Colorado

Greenland map

Marja Kröger of the Alfred Weneger Institute in Germany stands over the NEEM deep ice core drill, where four seasons of work yielded 8,340 feet of ice that recorded the last 115,000 years in time. Photo courtesy Tyler Jones, University of Colorado

Frank Urban of the U.S. Geological Survey, left, and INSTAAR affiliate and USGS scientist Gary Clow take temperature measurements in the NEEM drill hole to determine the internal temperature of the ice sheet. Photo courtesy Tyler Jones, University of Colorado

The sun never sets for researchers participating in the NEEM deep ice core project on the Greenland ice sheet. Photo courtesy Tyler Jones

Gregory Teste, left, of the Laboratoire de Glaciologie et Géophysique de l'Environnement in France and CU-Boulder’s Tyler Jones in the main drilling trench. Photo courtesy Tyler Jones, University of Colorado

An increasing number of melt ponds are being seen on Greenland, which has been losing roughly 200 million tons of ice annually since 2003. Photo courtesy Tyler Jones, University of Colorado