Frozen Annals - Greenland Ice Sheet Research

Willi Dansgaard has played a pivotal role in developing ice core research into one of the most powerful tools in present studies of past climate changes. His ground breaking work on the link between stable isotopic composition of precipitation and atmospheric temperature, which he discovered almost by accident in 1952, led to the first ever systematically analyzed deep ice core records of past climate: Camp Century (Greenland) in 1969 and Byrd Station (Antarctica) in 1972. Since his retirement in 1992, Willi Dansgaards group has continued its work on ice core research. The group is the Ice and Climate research group at the Niels Bohr Institute.

The book is written in English, and in it Willi Dansgaard gives his personal perspective on the history of ice core research from the pioneering years in the early 1950's until the successful termination of the NorthGRIP ice coring in 2004. Willi Dansgaard tells his story with the Danish contribution to the exploration of the Greenland Ice Sheet at it's center. The book contains a lot of scientific results which are discussed in a historical perspective so that the reader will be able to "read over the shoulder of the working scientist" and appreciate the development from simple ideas to the detailed, complex and quite astonishing scientific knowledge ice core research so far has provided.
Associate Professor Jorgen Peder Steffensen