Ice cores tell us how climate and atmospheric composition have varied in the past. IPICS will develop international plans for new projects on timescales from 2000 to over a million years. A focus in IPY will be on starting a core to bedrock in Greenland that aims to show us how the climate and ice sheet responded during the last warm interglacial period on Earth.

Understanding the state of the cryosphere, and its associated past, present and future variability, is essential to understanding physical and biogeochemical interactions between the oceanic, atmospheric, terrestrial, social, cultural, and economic systems. This project will provide a framework for assessing the state of cryosphere. It will establish links with IPY projects involved in monitoring, assessing, and understanding the global cryosphere, and with projects involved in socioeconomic and cultural issues.

The Kinnvika project will re-open an old research station from the previous polar year to study Arctic Warming and Impact Research. The spectrum of projects from geosciences to the humanities, investigates how the environmental and anthropogenic dynamics have changed recently in comparison with past records of change from existing expedition logs and photographs, proxy climate data from ice-, lake- and sea-sediment cores, and dynamic studies both on terrestrial as marine ice. This is a major multi-national multi-disciplined project involving 26 working groups and more than 80 Principal Investigators.