Lake Vostok ice core research. Assistant curator at an ice core facility holding up a piece of ice taken from above Lake Vostok in Antarctica. This is the National Ice Core Laboratory (NICL) in Colorado, USA. The cores cover hundreds of thousands of years of past climatic history due to air trapped in the ice. These studies allow reconstructions of past climate states of the Earth, aiding models of current climate change. The NICL has over 14,000 metres of ice cores from 34 drill sites in Greenland, Antarctica and high mountain glaciers in the western USA. Photographed in October 2002.