The National Ice Core Laboratory (NICL) was established in 1993 and is located at the Denver Federal Center in Lakewood, Colorado. NICL is a joint program funded by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and the National Science Foundation (NSF). NICL is housed administratively within the USGS, Office of the Regional Executive for Geology, Central Region, which is responsible for all operational aspects of the facility.
The facility's most important responsibility is for the safe and secure storage and curation of ice cores that are collected primarily by NSF sponsored projects. The laboratory also provides the opportunity for scientists to examine ice cores without having to travel to remote field sites.
The main archive freezer is 55,000 cubic feet in size and is held at a temperature of -36 degrees Celcius. A second room for examination of ice cores, held at -25 degrees Celcius, is 12,000 cubic feet in size and is contiguous with the archive area. There is also a Class-100 HEPA-filtered, cold clean room. NICL also maintains space outside the freezer facility for material fabrication, storage, changing areas, offices, and visiting scientist workspace.
NICL currently stores over 14,000 meters of ice core collected from various locations in Antarctica, Greenland, and North America.
Tours of the NICL facility are provided upon request, dependent on availability. To schedule a tour of the NICL facility, or to request more information, contact the curators at 303-202-4830 or nicl@usgs.gov. More information about NICL can be found on the USGS NICL website.
NICL-SMO is located at the Climate Change Research Center of the Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans and Space, at the University of New Hampshire.
NICL-SMO, with the assistance of the ICWG, oversees the scientific operations and activities at NICL.
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Photo courtesy of the National Ice Core Laboratory (© NICL/USGS)
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