The U.S. National Ice Core Laboratory (NICL) is a National Science Foundation (NSF) facility for storing, curating, and studying meteoric ice cores recovered from the glaciated regions of the world; mostly from Antarctica and Greenland. The NICL is funded by the NSF Division of Polar Programs and operated by the USGS; and the NICL’s science operations are managed by the University of New Hampshire. NICL provides scientists with the capability to conduct examinations and measurements on ice cores, and it preserves the integrity of these ice cores in a long-term repository for future investigations. The NICL was established in 1993 and is located at the Denver Federal Center, in Denver, Colorado. The NICL’s primary mission is to safely [...]
Summary
The U.S. National Ice Core Laboratory (NICL) is a National Science Foundation (NSF) facility for storing, curating, and studying meteoric ice cores recovered from the glaciated regions of the world; mostly from Antarctica and Greenland. The NICL is funded by the NSF Division of Polar Programs and operated by the USGS; and the NICL’s science operations are managed by the University of New Hampshire. NICL provides scientists with the capability to conduct examinations and measurements on ice cores, and it preserves the integrity of these ice cores in a long-term repository for future investigations.
The NICL was established in 1993 and is located at the Denver Federal Center, in Denver, Colorado. The NICL’s primary mission is to safely and securely store and curate ice cores primarily collected during NSF-sponsored projects. The NICL’s central location in Denver allows researchers to easily visit the facility, barring the need to travel to remote field sites, which is expensive and seasonally-limited. The 1,557 cubic meter (55,000 cubic feet) NICL facility stores the world’s largest ice core collection available to researchers. The NICL is dedicated to the storage of meteoric ice samples only; no seawater, soil, or other potentially contaminating samples are stored in NICL facilities. New ice samples generally arrive at the NICL, annually. The NICL includes a storage freezer housing the ice cores at a temperature of -38°C. An adjacent 12,000 cubic foot workroom is used for examination, handling, and cutting of ice cores at an ambient temperature of -24°C.
Currently, the NICL stores over 18,300 1-meter and 1.5-meter tubes of ice cores collected from over 100 boreholes drilled in Antarctica, Greenland, and North America. The collection of cores includes some of the oldest and deepest ice cores recovered, including Summit Greenland (~110,000 years old) and Vostok (~450,000 years old). Cores recovered from as far back as 1958 to the present are stored at the NICL. Visiting NICL scientists examine and subsample the ice cores, seeking to understand past climatic variations, volcanic eruptions, sea level changes, and fundamental processes in ice mechanics and associated characteristics affected by extreme glaciated environments.
