SOUTH POLE, ANTARCTICA-- At the South Pole, carbon dioxide has been measured for just over 50 years now and there are a few different methods of obtaining a CO2 value... {Read More »}

By drilling into deep ocean sediments along Antarctica, scientists hope to uncover the earth’s climate history from a time when Antarctica was largely ice-free, and to investigate its transition to the glacier-covered continent we know today. Investigating this history will help lead to a better understanding of the climate changes we’re experiencing in the present day. {Read More »}

Heidi Roop is part of a team more than 100 scientists collecting and analyzing a 2-mile-long (3.5-km-long) ice core from the West Antarctica Ice Sheet (WAIS) Divide. The WAIS team estimates that this ice core will reveal climate changes that have happened as far back as 100,000 years, a time when woolly mammoths still walked the earth. {Read More »}

MCMURDO STATION, ANTARCTICA-- The primary science objective for our field team this season is to core buried glacier ice to depths of 40+ meters. The outstanding question is, how old is the ice?... {Read More »}

Scientists at NOAA’s Atmospheric Research Observatory (ARO) at the South Pole are measuring global atmospheric carbon dioxide levels from the cleanest air on earth. {Read More »}

Carbon dioxide is a colorless, odorless gas that makes up .04 percent of the earth’s atmosphere. It’s released by the breakdown of organic materials, by animals when they respire, and by the burning of fossil fuels. Carbon dioxide isn't toxic—after all, we exhale it with every breath and use it to make our drinks fizzy. However, as a greenhouse gas, it’s a significant contributor to global warming. {Read More »}

Performing controlled scientific experiments in a living ecosystem is complex and very difficult, but important to understanding how biological communities will respond to and affect climate change. This is an especially critical research question in the high Arctic, where global warming is happening at twice the rate of more temperate regions of the earth. {Read More »}