Last Friday, I got to tour the National Ice Core Laboratory in Denver, and I haven’t been this excited since visiting Disney World when I was a little kid.

Ice Core

ACE led a breakout session at a workshop about Colorado’s climate and water future put on by one of our partners, the Colorado Foundation for Water Education, and as part of the workshop all the attendees toured the Ice Core Lab. After years of following ice core research and talking about them during the ACE presentation, I actually got to see one up close! My inner climate science geek jumped up and down with excitement.

Ice cores are what scientists use to measure the Earth’s climate history, or paleoclimate. They tend to come from pretty remote regions of the world, usually either Antarctica or Greenland, and can contain an incredible amount of information about what climate looked like in the past – everything from temperature and precipitation to the chemistry and gas composition of the lower atmosphere. As Ron Burgundy would say, they’re kind of a big deal. (Check out Reb’s science reports here and here for more detailed info about how scientists use ice cores.)

Jessie Fischer at the National Ice Core Laboratory

The lab was extremely cold. The main storage for ice cores is maintained at -36 C, making it not only one of the coolest, but also the coldest places I’ve ever been! There are few places in the world that ever reach this temperature. In fact, it’s so cold the computers have to be kept in special boxes to keep them warm and functioning! Standing there shivering in my parka, I was in awe of our tour guide who seemed completely fine wearing a fleece.

Overall, it was a transformative, once-in-a-lifetime experience, and I can’t wait to share all the information my colleagues and students. Ice cores paint this beautiful picture of carbon dioxide and temperature going up and down together. But if I’ve learned anything from ice cores, it’s that if we’re actually going to tackle climate change, we need to be looking not only at the past, but more importantly to the future.