Frozen deep beneath Antarctica and Greenland lies something remarkable. Tiny bubbles of ancient air, locked away in ice for hundreds of thousands of years, hold secrets about our planet's past.

As climate change continues to be a pressing global issue, scientists are racing against time to analyze Earth’s oldest ice cores. These ancient frozen archives hold invaluable data that could unlock ...

Like the inverse of the mythical butterfly flapping its wings in China, an ice core extracted from Greenland can reveal the rise and fall of societies in European antiquity. A new study took ice cores ...

After years as a professional research assistant at INSTAAR’s stable isotope lab, Valerie Morris estimates she’s processed more than 10 kilometers of ice from around the world. “You’ve done more ice ...

An ancient glacier high in the French Alps has revealed the oldest known ice in Western Europe—dating back over 12,000 years to the last Ice Age. This frozen archive, meticulously analyzed by ...

Scientists collect core samples from the polar ice sheets to learn about our planet’s climatic past. This core, extracted in Greenland in 2019, contains the Vedde ash layer, likely remnants of an ...

Rosie is a freelance writer living in London. She has covered everything from ancient Egyptian temples to exciting medical breakthroughs, but she particularly enjoys writing about wildlife, ...

This story was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center. This story was made possible through the assistance of the U.S. National Science Foundation Office of Polar Programs. Inside a tent ...