Ice Cores!

This lesson available from the COOL2.0 climate education website begins with a 10 minute TED video titled Inside an Antarctic time machine where science columnist Lee Hotz, describes a project at WAIS Divide, Antarctica, where a team is drilling into ten-thousand-year-old ice.  The video does a nice job of showing how the researchers live and work in the cold and snowy Antarctic.

The lesson then proceeds to a wet lab activity in which students use ice cores to collect evidence of past climates and a dry lab activity where students analyze data patterns from ice cores  from Antarctica and Greenland.

Ice Core Investigations, an article from the September 2008 issue of The Science Teacher also features an ice core investigation activity for students.