A European consortium will head to Antarctica in December to begin the process of drilling deep into the Antarctica's eastern ice sheet in order to extract ancient ice. Scientists hope this can lead them to a greater understanding of Earth's past climate history.

CU Boulder's Stable Isotope Laboratory (SIL) studies oxygen and hydrogen in water from the world's ice cores. Stable isotopes of precipitation are a proxy for temperature when the snow fell, making ice cores a rich paleoclimate archive. The lab has studied cores from Antarctica and Greenland and can speak to the processes and value of using ice to examine ancient climate conditions on Earth.