Ancient Ice and Our Planet's Future

This short video describes how the compression of Antarctic snow into ice captures air from past atmospheres. It shows how ice cores are drilled from the Antarctic ice and prepared for shipment and subsequent analysis.

Go To:

https://www.nsf.gov/news/news_videos.jsp

WAIS Divide Ice Core Project

National Science Foundation

Notes From Our Reviewers

The CLEAN collection is hand-picked and rigorously reviewed for scientific accuracy and classroom effectiveness. Read what our review team had to say about this resource below or learn more about how CLEAN reviews teaching materials

Teaching Tips

Use as a short intro to lesson on ice cores. This is the first in a three-video series, which also includes "Life on the Ice" and "Modeling our Future Climate".

About the Science

Video shows the process of collecting ice cores. No data is shown or discussed.

Comments from expert scientist: The video explains the importance of climate change, and the usefulness of scientific study to understand past climate for the purpose of becoming better at predicting future climate. The focus is WAIS Divide and the ice coring operations taking place there. The video explains how ice layers accumulate and how pockets of air form within the layers. Explanations of how the cores are collected and logged are included. The science is accurate, but does not go in-depth.

About the Pedagogy

The video is not accompanied by any background materials - although there is lots of background material on the project website - http://www.waisdivide.unh.edu/

Technical Details

Excellent quality. The images and video are high resolution and suitable for projection in a classroom.