Greenland ice core

A cylinder of ice drilled from the Greenland Ice Sheet that preserves annual layers, trapped air, and chemical traces of past climate and atmospheric conditions.

Ice core: A cylindrical sample of glacier or ice-sheet ice containing layers that preserve environmental records. Greenland cores are one regional type of this broader archive.
Ice-core drilling: The extraction of long cylindrical ice samples using specialized drills. Greenland records begin with drilling through the ice sheet to recover intact sections.
Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2: A deep ice-core project that recovered a long climate record from central Greenland in the 1990s. GISP2 supplied a high-resolution record of abrupt climate shifts and ancient conditions.
Dansgaard–Oeschger event: A rapid warming followed by gradual cooling recorded repeatedly in Greenland ice during the last glacial period. Greenland cores revealed these abrupt climate oscillations in exceptional detail.
Oldest ice in Greenland: The oldest ice preserved in Greenland, whose age and continuity vary across the ice sheet. Finding intact ancient ice could extend Greenland’s climate history beyond existing cores.
Ice core dating: Methods for assigning ages to layers and materials within ice cores. Dating establishes when Greenland’s preserved climate changes occurred.
Firn: Old granular snow that has survived at least one melt season but has not yet become solid glacial ice. In Greenland firn, pores remain open while snow compacts toward bubble-trapping ice.
Greenland Ice Core Project: An international project that drilled a deep Greenland core at Summit from 1989 to 1993. GRIP produced a major Greenland chronology used alongside GISP2.
Greenland temperature reconstruction: An estimate of past Greenland temperatures derived from ice-core measurements and climate models. Isotope records in the cores provide key evidence for reconstructing Greenland’s temperature history.
Eemian interglacial: The warm interval roughly 129,000 to 116,000 years ago, before the last glacial period. Greenland cores constrain how much ice survived when temperatures exceeded recent levels.

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