Ice-core research springs to life in a multimedia post on the Climate Feedback blog of Nature Reports: Climate Change (http://tinyurl.com/l7now2). NRCC assistant editor Anna Barnett explains why ice-core records are unparalleled proxies for climatic history: “Their data stretch back 800,000 years and are conveniently located in some of the world's most climatically sensitive regions.”

NRCC has published a timeline (http://tinyurl.com/me5rfq) covering the discoveries made through studies of deep polar ice cores, “from the first efforts to read ice records through to today's hunt for ice a million years old or more.” A Google Earth interactive map lets viewers take a spin to the poles to take a virtual tour of the drilling sites.

The post also includes a video made by the American Museum of Natural History in New York on glaciologist Lonnie Thompson's work archiving ice from the world's melting tropical ice caps such as the Quelccaya glacier in Peru. The clip joins Thompson on his latest expedition to document the glacier's retreat and highlights the human side of climate research.