Ice Cores

In the 1990s Richard B. Alley and his colleagues made headlines with the discovery that the last ice age came to an abrupt end over a period of only three years. In The Two-Mile Time Machine, Alley tells the fascinating history of global climate changes as revealed by reading the annual rings of ice from cores drilled in Greenland. He explains that humans have experienced an unusually temperate climate compared to the wild fluctuations that characterized most of prehistory. He warns that our comfortable environment could come to an end in a matter of years and tells us what we need to know in order to understand and perhaps overcome climate changes in the future. In a new preface, the author weighs in on whether our understanding of global climate change has altered in the years since the book was first published, what the latest research tells us, and what he is working on next.

One of Springer’s Major Reference Works, this book gives the reader a truly global perspective. It is the first major reference work in its field. Paleoclimate topics covered in the encyclopedia give the reader the capability to place the observations of recent global warming in the context of longer-term natural climate fluctuations. Significant elements of the encyclopedia include recent developments in paleoclimate modeling, paleo-ocean circulation, as well as the influence of geological processes and biological feedbacks on global climate change. The encyclopedia gives the reader an entry point into the literature on these and many other groundbreaking topics.

A riveting, urgent account of the explorers and scientists racing to understand the rapidly melting ice sheet in Greenland, a dramatic harbinger of climate change “Jon Gertner takes readers to spots few journalists or even explorers have visited. The result is a gripping and important book.”—Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sixth Extinction NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post • The Christian Science Monitor • Library Journal Greenland: a remote, mysterious island five times the size of California but with a population of just 56,000. The ice sheet that covers it is 700 miles wide and 1,500 miles long, and is composed of nearly three quadrillion tons of ice. For the last 150 years, explorers and scientists have sought to understand Greenland—at first hoping that it would serve as a gateway to the North Pole, and later coming to realize that it contained essential information about our climate. Locked within this vast and frozen white desert are some of the most profound secrets about our planet and its future. Greenland’s ice doesn’t just tell us where we’ve been. More urgently, it tells us where we’re headed. In The Ice at the End of the World, Jon Gertner explains how Greenland has evolved from one of earth’s last frontiers to its largest scientific laboratory. The history of Greenland’s ice begins with the explorers who arrived here at the turn of the twentieth century—first on foot, then on skis, then on crude, motorized sleds—and embarked on grueling expeditions that took as long as a year and often ended in frostbitten tragedy. Their original goal was simple: to conquer Greenland’s seemingly infinite interior. Yet their efforts eventually gave way to scientists who built lonely encampments out on the ice and began drilling—one mile, two miles down. Their aim was to pull up ice cores that could reveal the deepest mysteries of earth’s past, going back hundreds of thousands of years. Today, scientists from all over the world are deploying every technological tool available to uncover the secrets of this frozen island before it’s too late. As Greenland’s ice melts and runs off into the sea, it not only threatens to affect hundreds of millions of people who live in coastal areas. It will also have drastic effects on ocean currents, weather systems, economies, and migration patterns. Gertner chronicles the unfathomable hardships, amazing discoveries, and scientific achievements of the Arctic’s explorers and researchers with a transporting, deeply intelligent style—and a keen sense of what this work means for the rest of us. The melting ice sheet in Greenland is, in a way, an analog for time. It contains the past. It reflects the present. It can also tell us how much time we might have left.

The analysis of polar ice cores has proven to be very instructive about past environmental conditions on the time scale of several climatic cycles, and recent drilling operations have provided information of great value for global change issues. The book presents the most recent data extracted from Greenland ice cores and surface experiments and compares them with former Antarctic results. It contains background articles, original contributions and group reports of interest to scientists, climatologists, atmospheric chemists, and glaciologists involved in global change research.

In the 1990s Richard B. Alley and his colleagues made headlines with the discovery that the last ice age came to an abrupt end over a period of only three years. In The Two-Mile Time Machine, Alley tells the fascinating history of global climate changes as revealed by reading the annual rings of ice from cores drilled in Greenland. He explains that humans have experienced an unusually temperate climate compared to the wild fluctuations that characterized most of prehistory. He warns that our comfortable environment could come to an end in a matter of years and tells us what we need to know in order to understand and perhaps overcome climate changes in the future. In a new preface, the author weighs in on whether our understanding of global climate change has altered in the years since the book was first published, what the latest research tells us, and what he is working on next.

The line-scan images collected in this book represent the most accurate optical record of Antarctic ice cores ever presented, providing an invaluable resource for glaciologists and climate modellers, as well as a fascinating compilation of ice core images for Antarctica enthusiasts. Global warming and the Earth’s past climate are the two main reasons for extracting deep ice cores from Antarctica. Indeed, dust particles, aerosols and other climatic traces deposited on the snow surface, as well as the air trapped in bubbles by compacted snow, produce chronologically ordered strata, making the ice from Antarctica the most accurate and valuable archive of the Earth’s climate over the last million years. In addition, the layered structure produced by these strata, when revealed by appropriate methods, provides indispensable information concerning the flow and mechanical stability of the Antarctic ice sheet, allowing us to assess the current and future impact of global warming on the melting of polar ice caps with much greater precision.

A dazzling introduction to paleoclimatology for kids, connecting the methods that scientists use to study our climate history with future climate change solutions. Believe it or not, ice isn’t always just frozen water. In fact, most of the ice covering our planet contains thousands of years' worth of information about our atmosphere. This ice is made up of a lot more than snow—it has soot, volcanic ash, gasses, and other substances that affect the climate. And if we drill a piece of that ice? We get a frozen time capsule, courtesy of Earth. In this exhilarating middle grade nonfiction book by a former educator, kids are immersed in the field of paleoclimatology. Readers go along on an ice core expedition, run through each step in the collecting and transporting process, review the fascinating components of an ice core, and explore the specialized labs where scientists examine them. But these pieces of our planet are more than just cool records. By preserving and studying these frosty collections of climate history, we can learn from previous patterns and better protect our planet in the future. The final chapter focuses on ice as a key tool in the fight against climate change. With crystal-clear explanations and an engaging, kid friendly tone, the book features 15+ full-color photographs, diagrams, interviews with paleoclimatologists, a glossary of terms, and simple experiments for budding scientists at home. Books for a Better Earth are designed to inspire children to become active, knowledgeable participants in caring for the planet they live on. A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection

The surfaces of the deep ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica were contaminated during drilling at concentration levels several orders of magnitude greater than those found in the uncontaminated ice. Several procedures for removing these contaminants were studied. Ultrasonic vibration followed by self-cleaning in meltwater was found to be the most effective procedure for removal of surface contamination. (Author).

In response to a request from Congress, Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years assesses the state of scientific efforts to reconstruct surface temperature records for Earth during approximately the last 2,000 years and the implications of these efforts for our understanding of global climate change. Because widespread, reliable temperature records are available only for the last 150 years, scientists estimate temperatures in the more distant past by analyzing "proxy evidence," which includes tree rings, corals, ocean and lake sediments, cave deposits, ice cores, boreholes, and glaciers. Starting in the late 1990s, scientists began using sophisticated methods to combine proxy evidence from many different locations in an effort to estimate surface temperature changes during the last few hundred to few thousand years. This book is an important resource in helping to understand the intricacies of global climate change.