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The Saint Elias Mountains from the window of a Twin Otter aircraft en route to an ice core drill site in May 2002.: Photo by Cameron Wake, UNH.Researchers from the Universities of Maine and New Hampshire are headed to the highest mountain in the North America this month to gather ice samples for climate change research.

Climatologist Cameron Wake from the University of New Hampshire and six other researchers are on a kind of reconnaissance mission to Denali National Park in Alaska, where Mount McKinley towers more than 20 thousand feet above sea level. Their big goal is to gather a picture of climate change in the Arctic. For now they’re scouting the best place to drill a five to eight hundred-foot Ice core which was formed one to two thousand years ago. Wake says an ice core contains a climate record.

“One of the real beauties of glaciers is essentially there’s very limited or no melting. And so all the snow that falls in any one year actually stays there. And snow falls on top of that and more snow on top of that and eventually that snow turns to ice. That ice just sort of packs on top of itself in a layer cake fashion. And essentially the deeper you go in the glacier as long as you have this layer cake stratigraphy, the farther back in time you get"

Because warming of the climate is happening faster in Alaska than in the lower 48, Wake says the scientific community is trying to obtain ice cores before the rate of melting increases.