The National Science Foundation Ice Core Facility (NSF-ICF), known as the National Ice Core Laboratory (NICL) before 2018, is the primary repository for

ice core An ice core is a core sample that is typically removed from an ice sheet or a high mountain glacier. Since the ice forms from the incremental buildup of annual layers of snow, lower layers are older than upper ones, and an ice core contains ...

s collected by the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country Continental United States, primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., ...

. The facility is located at the

Denver Federal Center The Denver Federal Center, in Lakewood, Colorado, is part of the General Services Administration and is home to about 6,200 employees of agencies of the federal government of the United States. The Center encompasses an area of about and has 9 ...

Lakewood, Colorado The City of Lakewood is the home rule municipality that is the most populous municipality in Jefferson County, Colorado, United States. The city population was 155,984 at the 2020 U.S. Census making Lakewood the fifth most populous city in Col ...

, and is managed by the

United States Geological Survey The United States Geological Survey (USGS), formerly simply known as the Geological Survey, is a scientific agency of the United States government. The scientists of the USGS study the landscape of the United States, its natural resources, ...

(USGS). Funding for the facility comes from the

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National ...

Office of Polar Programs, while scientific research is managed by the

University of New Hampshire The University of New Hampshire (UNH) is a public land-grant research university with its main campus in Durham, New Hampshire. It was founded and incorporated in 1866 as a land grant college in Hanover in connection with Dartmouth College ...

. NSF-ICF currently houses ~22,000 m of ice cores collected from

Greenland Greenland ( kl, Kalaallit Nunaat, ; da, Grønland, ) is an island country in North America that is part of the Kingdom of Denmark. It is located between the Arctic and Atlantic oceans, east of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Greenland ...

and

Antarctica Antarctica () is Earth's southernmost and least-populated continent. Situated almost entirely south of the Antarctic Circle and surrounded by the Southern Ocean, it contains the geographic South Pole. Antarctica is the fifth-largest cont ...

, including the

GISP2 The Greenland Ice Sheet Project (GISP) was a decade-long project to drill ice cores in Greenland that involved scientists and funding agencies from Denmark, Switzerland and the United States. Besides the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), f ...

Siple Dome Siple Dome () is an ice dome approximately 100 km wide and 100 km long, located 130 km east of Siple Coast in Antarctica. Charles Bentley and Robert Thomas established a "strain rosette" on this feature to determine ice movement in ...

, and portions of the Vostok cores. It is the lead facility for management of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Divide ice core. In addition to providing a large storage facility, maintained at -35 ° C, NSF-ICF also has one of the largest sub-zero research and sample preparation spaces in the world. NSF-ICF is responsible for distributing samples of ice cores in their collection to researchers around the world, following approved research proposals. In addition to the primary archive freezer, NSF-ICF has a nonsterile exam room, as well as a

FED-STD-209E FED-STD-209 E ''Airborne Particulate Cleanliness Classes in Cleanrooms and Cleanzones'' was a federal standard concerning classification of air cleanliness, intended for use in environments like cleanrooms. The standard based its classifications on ...

class-100

HEPA HEPA (, high-efficiency particulate air) filter, also known as high-efficiency particulate absorbing filter and high-efficiency particulate arrestance filter, is an efficiency standard of air filters. Filters meeting the HEPA standard must ...

-filtered, cold

cleanroom A cleanroom or clean room is an engineered space, which maintains a very low concentration of airborne particulates. It is well isolated, well-controlled from contamination, and actively cleansed. Such rooms are commonly needed for scientif ...

held at -24 °C that scientists use when examining ice cores. Scientists generally use the exam rooms to cut samples from the ice cores, and then ship the samples back to their home institution for analysis. Very little analysis of the ice cores occurs at NSF-ICF itself. In addition to research activities, NSF-ICF also participates in public outreach and gives ~100 tours per year.

External links

Ice Core Laboratory homepage

References

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See also

External links

References