“The ice cores themselves could be a tunnel back through time, that you enter it through an adventure story… you use as a venue for talking about important scientific problems, for investigating detective stories, which are local to regional and global…

…drilling back through time and using that to actually not only describe how the climate system regionally works, how it works globally, but also to pick up events in that local area, perhaps the advent of agriculture in, in New Zealand, the impact of pre-European cultures in New Zealand. There's an immense amount of mixture of archeology, sociology in, in what we do." - Dr. Paul Mayewski

Climate can change the world. From the dawn of life through the disappearance of dinosaurs, Ice Ages and ozone holes, this planet has been prey to dramatic and sometimes lethal shifts in temperature and environment.

The argument is over: there's now no doubt that human activity, from farming to fossil fuels, has speeded up the rate of change, especially in the last century. Knowing how climate behaved before we came into our own, and how that compares to what's going on now, is critical to maintaining human health, quality of life and the natural systems that support them.

Ice contains the single most accurate and durable record of Earth's environment, showing patterns in atmospheric, oceanic and human movement through layers of material frozen in time.

Over the past 20 years, Dr. Mayewski's group has used cores from polar ice to illuminate our past. Now they've proved that cores collected from the great mountain ranges of the lower latitudes also hold key information – information that will help predict future climate change over the long timespans planners and policy-makers need.

Because of global warming, this high-altitude ice – these vast glaciers – are melting. The loss of these records would be an international disaster.

Mayewski and the Climate Change Institute (www.climatechange.umaine.edu) are mounting a recovery effort that will guarantee that these records are available for scientific investigation by our institution and others… even after the glaciers are gone.