Ed Brook, Professor of Geosciences, Oregon State University
Snow falling on the polar ice sheets is slowly sintered in the cold, dry polar environment, becoming solid ice, and trapping the ancient atmosphere. Coring in Antarctica and Greenland has recovered ice as old as 780,000 years, in some cases with annual or sub annual detail. These ice cores providing a record of greenhouse gases and climate that reveals how the earth system responds to, and causes, changes in the atmosphere, on time scales from seasonal to multi-millennial. This presentation will discuss how such data are obtained, review established and new findings, and offer some thoughts about the relevance of this work for understanding the future.