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 »}

Scientists suspect that a buried alpine glacier in the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica may be over 8 million years old. If true, it's the oldest ice yet discovered on our planet and may contain an archive of climate data stretching back to the time of the earliest hominids. {Read More »}

ABOARD THE JOIDES RESOLUTION, ON THE BERING SEA-- This is the second installment in the two part summary of the life of a core on board the JOIDES Resolution. They are the ultimate reason we are out here... {Read More »}

From July to September 2009, the scientific drilling vessel JOIDES Resolution is undertaking a nine-week expedition in the Bering Sea, drilling deep into the sea floor to learn about the environmental and oceanographic conditions in the Bering Sea over the past 5 million years. {Read More »}

ABOARD THE JOIDES RESOLUTION, ON THE BERING SEA-- So the last few days have been a whirlwind of activity. We arrived at site UMK-4D and dropped a beacon... {Read More »}

RECOVERY LAKES, ANTARCTICA-- The last month has been a blur of flying snow from my shovel and endless white vistas seen from the windscreen of Jack, the finicky TL6 Berco I take turns driving. Even now, as Ole, our traverse doctor, drives Jack, I am typing in the back seat... {Read More »}

RECOVERY LAKE 'B', ANTARCTICA-- It's the snow, stupid! …that determines many factors for this traverse, that is. For instance, the changing snow surface impacts our fuel consumption quite a bit. In softer snow, the four vehicles use much more fuel... {Read More »}