A journey into the kingdom of ice, with Danish glaciologist Poul Christoffersen, just back from measuring the effects of a warming ocean on the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica; American engineer Mary Albert who studies ancient snow cores for crucial past climate clues; and Camille Seaman, a Native American artist whose photos of polar icebergs are ‘portraits of individuals’.

Photo: Breaching Iceberg – Greenland, August 8, 2008 © Camille Seaman

Mary R Albert

Mary Albert is Professor of Engineering at Thayer School of Engineering, Dartmouth in the US. She is also executive director of the US Ice Drilling Program. Her work is focused on firn, or ancient snow, extracted from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. She is examining firn’s microstructure and how it traps atmospheric gases, before it is compressed into ice and those gases are contained as bubbles within it. This will help us to better understand our record of past climate, gleaned from ice cores, that now goes back 800,000 years.