IPICS

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Ice cores provide information about past climate and environmental conditions on timescales from decades to hundreds of millennia, and direct records of the composition of the atmosphere. As such, they are cornerstones of global change research. For example, ice cores play a central role in showing how closely climate and greenhouse gas concentrations were linked in the past, and in demonstrating that very abrupt climate switches can occur.

With the completion of major projects in Greenland and Antarctica over the last 15 years, the international ice coring community is planning for the next several decades. The costs and scope of future work create the need for coordinated international collaboration. Developing this international collaboration is the charge of IPICS, the International Partnerships in Ice Core Sciences, a planning group currently composed of ice core scientists, engineers, and drillers from 18 nations. IPICS is supported by PAGES (Past Global Changes), SCAR (Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research) and IACS (International Association of Cryospheric Sciences), although it is not a formal project under any of these organizations.

Two international meetings in 2004 and 2005 (Brook, E. and Wolff, E.W., The future of ice core science, EOS, 87 (4), p. 39. 2006) lead to an ambitious four-element framework that both extends the ice core record in time and enhances spatial resolution. The scientific goals and their implementation have been outlined in the four IPICS White Papers