ONE-STOP SHOPPING FOR ICE CORE DATA
San Francisco, California, USA -- December 2000
Data from ice cores from
glaciers and mountain summits allow scientists a glimpse into
the frozen past, providing valuable information about the global
climate that existed in recent years and thousands of years ago.
Data from these icy archives will soon be available at a
one-stop shop on the Internet, thanks to an agreement between
two major data centers, according to Dr. C. Mark Eakin, head
of NOAA's Paleoclimatology Program. He was addressing
attendees of the American Geophysical Union's fall meeting in
San Francisco Friday. "A new partnership has been established
to meet the needs of scientists to obtain data, as well as to
provide an organized, long-term archive for the data," Eakin
said. "The new Ice Core Gateway provides one-stop shopping
from which scientists, educators, and the public can access
ice-core research from a variety of disciplines. It will also
provide an easy way for scientists to contribute their data to the
data centers."
The data centers involved with the project are the NOAA
Paleoclimatology Program/World Data Center for
Paleoclimatology and the National Snow and Ice Data
Center/World Data Center for Glaciology, both located in
Boulder, Colorado. Eakin and his colleagues David Anderson,
Rob Bauer, Greg Scharfen, and Ted Scambos presented the
information about the new Web site to scientists studying
paleoceanography, paleoclimatology, and hydrology. The new
Web site will be available online at
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/icgate.
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