The History of Early Polar Ice Cores

The scientific knowledge of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, and the subsequently derived Earth history, has been greatly increased during the past 50 years. Much of the new information was obtained from various studies made on a relatively small number of deep (300-400 m) and several very deep (some over 3000 m) ice cores, recovered from the inland regions of both ice sheets by different national and international research teams. The beginning, development, and progress of deep polar ice core drillings and core studies is reviewed from the incipient pit study made by Ernst Sorge in 1930, through the trying efforts of three international core drilling projects mounted around 1950. The paper continues with a broad overview of the early role and achievements made by two related U.S. Army Corps of Engineers research laboratories: the Snow, Ice and Permafrost Research Establishment (SIPRE), and the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL), from the early 1950s to the late 1980s. International partnerships of CRREL with the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and the University of Bern, Switzerland, starting in 1962, established the foundation of polar ice core science.