Imagine a giant meat locker. Now imagine three of them in a row. That's where several kilometers of ice from the deep drilling projects at Vostok and Dome C of the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica are stored outside of Grenoble, France. For my thesis work, I'm using these ice core records to reconstruct past climate conditions going back to 800,000 years ago. Unfortunately, by the time I started my thesis, these deep drilling projects were completed or nearly, so I didn't get a chance to make it out onto the ice. That's where the meat lockers come in. Several times a year I get to suit up and make my way past pallets of meat and cheese (this is France) to cut samples of ice to bring back to my lab outside of Paris. At -18deg C, the stench is muted but pervasive. The good news is that with several million euros worth of commerce at stake, these freezers aren't about to fail.

Gabrielle Dreyfus
Grad student
LSCE/IPSL, laboratoire (CEA/CNRS/UVSQ), France
Department of Geosciences, Princeton University, USA

Photo: Suited up for work in our -25degC cold room (note the attractive orange jumpsuit)