Read the full story at Hakai Magazine.
In a narrow aisle of shelves packed with cardboard boxes, Jørgen Peder Steffensen grins like a mischievous child unwrapping a holiday present as he pulls out a plastic-wrapped hunk of ice from a box marked Keep Frozen.
The bag of ice contains the transition from 1 BCE to 1 CE, he says. “That means we have the real Christmas snow.”
This piece of ice, a bit longer than his arm, doesn’t visibly look different from modern ice. Yet bubbles trapped in it preserve the chemistry of the air in Greenland from more than two millennia ago. “But we can’t find any traces of reindeer, or magical dust,” Steffensen quips.
In this freezer facility in Denmark, Steffensen’s team at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen stores some 40,000 segments of ice cores, long cylinders of ice from polar regions that preserve the history of past climate. Beyond cataloging frozen treasures, Steffensen collaborates on research that chisels out historical secrets hidden in ice, and runs logistics for an international drilling project in Greenland to retrieve even more deep-core samples.
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