The Ice Core Working Group (ICWG) is a group of scientist who investigate scientific issues pertaining to ice cores. Members are selected from the scientific community and their role consists of providing guidance to the NSF and the USGS on topics related to sample access, distribution, inventory, policy issues, operation and maintenance of the National Ice Core Laboratory (NICL), and future directions for ice core research.
NICL-SMO assists the ICWG in defining its existing policies and directions for NICL, which are reviewed on a yearly basis. To foster future directions in ice core research, NICL-SMO assists the ICWG in polling the scientific community, developing reports, planning workshops and plenary discussions.
In June of 2003 the ICWG published a planning document for the future of U.S. ice core research, U.S. Ice Core Sciences: Recommendations for the Future. This document details the plans for the collection, integration and interpretation of a global array of ice cores over a period of the next 5-10 years. The U.S. ice core community has a long term interest in collecting ice cores from low-mid-high latitude regions. Resultant records provide an excellent framework for comparison with other paleoclimate records from, for example, marine and lacustrine cores, tree rings, cave and coral deposits, glacial geologic features and historic and instrumental records.
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