Hot Ice

Records taken from a Greenland ice core showed pollution from coal burning in North America and Europe - material that traveled through the atmosphere and deposited in the Arctic Region - was higher 100 years ago, confounding researcher expectations that pollution was at its peak in the 1960s and '70s. This image is of an ice core sample sitting on a melter head in a research facility at the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nev. The longitudinal ice core sample falls by gravity onto the heated melter plate, and the melt water splits into three streams via grooves etched into the melter head. Only the innermost 10 percent of the melt water is used for ultra-trace elemental measurements. The middle 20 percent is used for major ions and particle size determinations. The potentially contaminated outer 70 percent of the melt water is discarded.

Credit: Joseph McConnell, Desert Research Institute