A One-stop Shop For Ice Core Data

The new Ice Core Gateway provides one-stop shopping from which scientists, educators and the public can access ice-core research from a variety of disciplines.

Washington - Jan 24, 2001
Data from ice cores from glaciers and mountain summits allow scientists a glimpse into the frozen past, providing valuable information about the global climate that existed in recent years and thousands of years ago.

Data from these icy archives is now available at a one-stop shop on the Internet, thanks to an agreement between two major data centers, announced Dr. C. Mark Eakin, head of NOAA's Paleoclimatology Program at last Decembers American Geophysical Union's meeting in San Francisco.

"A new partnership has been established to meet the needs of scientists to obtain data, as well as to provide an organized, long-term archive for the data," Eakin said.

"The new Ice Core Gateway provides one-stop shopping from which scientists, educators and the public can access ice-core research from a variety of disciplines. It will also provide an easy way for scientists to contribute their data to the data centers."

The data centers involved with the project are the NOAA Paleoclimatology Program/World Data Center for Paleoclimatology and the National Snow and Ice Data Center/World Data Center for Glaciology, both located in Boulder, Colo.

Eakin and his colleagues David Anderson, Rob Bauer, Greg Scharfen, and Ted Scambos presented the information about the new Web site to scientists studying paleoceanography, paleoclimatology, and hydrology.

TERRADAILY

Patterns of Global Climate Change Over Recent Centuries

Washington - Nov. 27, 2000
For the first time, year-by-year patterns of global temperature over the past few centuries have now been revealed. Evidence from ice cores, tree rings, corals, historical records and sediments in lakes was used by a team of university and NOAA scientists to obtain the yearly maps, extending the history of global climate to a time before people began taking measurements with weather instruments.

Antarctica's Frozen Past May Hold Clues To Future Climate

College Park - Nov. 15, 2000
To learn how the Earth's climate has varied in the past and how it might change in the future, university scientist Christopher Shuman is willing to travel to the ends of the earth. Currently, he is braving cold and winds at the bottom end Antarctica. There, preserved in the ice, he expects to find evidence of atmospheric conditions on Earth hundreds of years ago, before the onset of industrialization.

Himalayan Ice Cores Reveal a Thousand Years of Climate
Columbus - Sept. 19, 2000

Ice cores drilled through a glacier more than four miles up in the Himalayan Mountains have yielded a highly detailed record of the last 1,000 years of earth's climate in the high Tibetan Plateau.

Combing The Ocean Depths For Climate Clues
Los Angeles - September 11, 2000

In a new study expected to improve predictions of global climate change, microscopic fossil shells from the deep ocean floor show that prehistoric temperature shifts in the tropical Pacific Ocean correlate closely with the birth and death of ice ages, say University of California scientists.

150-year Global Ice Record Reveals Major Warming Trend
Madison - September 11, 2000

From sources as diverse as newspaper archives, transportation ledgers and religious observances, scientists have amassed lake and river ice records spanning the Northern Hemisphere that show a steady 150-year warming trend.