The vanishing archive
Opening photo by Zac Robinson
Climate change is perhaps the most urgent global problem of our time. But if you’re a scientist whose work involves our changing climate, there is another layer of haste: the data that powers your research is literally melting, thawing or otherwise disappearing with each ever-warmer year.
The loss of that data impoverishes everyone living now and generations yet to come. We need it today to understand and manage the effects of climate change. Future scientists with future technologies may be able to mine it with new technologies for insights on their most urgent problems.
海角社区 scientists Alison Criscitiello and Duane Froese both analyze data drawn from sources jeopardized by climate change. As the world warms, each project they pursue is more urgent than the last — for all of us today and for everyone yet to come.
Here’s how and why they do it.
Core concerns
Criscitiello focuses her research deeply on specific spots — most recently to a specific depth of 327 metres. That is the length of the ice core that Criscitiello and her collaborators extracted from Mount Logan in 2022. As glacial ice forms, bubbles of atmosphere get trapped within. This makes it an excellent record of past atmospheric conditions — if the ice doesn’t melt.
“In general, our longest climate records from ice cores come from the polar regions, which remain frozen even in the height of summer,” says Criscitiello. “We have these long paleoclimate records from the polar regions, but we lack long-term climate information from the rest of the world.”
“For non-polar regions, there aren’t many places you can go where, in the height of summer and over very long time periods, they don’t melt. We’re talking about the coldest, highest parts of the world’s mountain regions.”
“It sits within the largest non-polar ice field in the world, the St. Elias,” she says. “And Logan itself is huge — it has the largest base of any non-volcanic mountain on Earth, which means the summit plateau is also huge. It’s a bowl 20 kilometres across, sitting at altitude, accumulating a record of ice and not melting.”
After reconnoitering the site with radar in 2021, Criscitiello led a team of seven to the summit plateau of Logan to drill an ice core in 2022. After a punishing ski journey to reach the summit plateau, the team drilled 327 metres of ice in one-metre increments over 12 days using an “eclipse” ice drill developed by expedition member Etienne Gros with Yukon’s Icefield Instruments.
The ice is now safely ensconced in a -36°C freezer at the Canadian Ice Core Lab back at the 海角社区. Criscitiello and her team divided the samples in half, analyzing half with techniques like ion chromatography, fluorescence spectroscopy and dark-field illumination stratigraphy. Past fire history is useful for future fire projections, and data needs to be local to be useful. “We can’t reconstruct North Pacific fire history with a polar core,” Criscitiello says. “If we want to reconstruct wildfire history in the North Pacific, sea ice history in the Gulf of Alaska or other regional paleoclimate histories, we need a core that comes from there.”
The other half of the ice core samples? They are preserved at the Canadian Ice Core Lab for unknown future researchers to study. Current climate models predict a time will come when the viability of the glaciers on Mount Logan are compromised.
At the time of writing this article, the first research papers about the Logan core were in the process of publication, and Criscitiello was preparing for her next expedition: a trip to Axel Heiberg Island, Nunavut, in April and May 2025 to drill a core from the Müller Ice Cap, which she expects will be at least 10,000 years old. The project will be a collaboration with a Danish research team headed by Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, who holds joint appointments at the University of Manitoba and the University of Copenhagen.
“I’ll be there until the beginning of June,” says Criscitiello. “We’ll have two drills going. The Danes will go to 620-ish metres over two months to get a full climate history, including reconstructing Arctic sea ice in the past. We will drill three approximately 100-metre deep cores with my drill during the second month, to extract enough ice to enable us to investigate the deposition of various environmental contaminants.”
Travelling to some of the most remote parts of the planet and drilling ice cores for 12 hours a day is not easy work. People ask her why she does it.
“There are still huge error bars on the various projections that exist for sea level rise, atmospheric and oceanic temperature rise, trends that have an enormous effect on a huge percentage of the world’s population,” she says. “The only way to reduce those error bars, make appropriate policies and put mitigations in place, is to decrease those error bars.”
Criscitello’s drive draws from her personal life. She wants for her children a world with a liveable climate — which means multiyear ice, and seasons of proper cold. And if you want to know how deeply she manifests her mission, the fact that she named her daughter “Winter” should tell you. Maybe one day Winter will wind up analyzing samples from Mount Logan that were drilled by her mom.
Impermanent permafrost
implications from a changing landscape to the loss of a carbon sink.
Photo by Dawn Graves
Multiyear ice is not the only climate record underfoot. Duane Froese, geoscientist and professor in the Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Department of the Faculty of Science, studies what’s found within permafrost, which is anything that is in the ground and below freezing temperature for at least two years.
“I got the opportunity to work in Northern Canada as an undergraduate,” he says. “I thought then that it was a one-off trip. But that was 30-some years ago, and I’ve been up every year since except 2020.”
He’s worked on woolly mammoths, Ice Age horses, and the Beringian steppe bison — all pulled from permafrost.
“It’s the best material on the planet for the preservation of past life,” says Froese. “In some areas, a gram of permafrost can have upwards of a billion fragments of DNA from plants and animals from 20-30,000 years ago.”
But for the last 10 years, Froese has worked mostly on the permafrost itself. “The urgency of the challenges of permafrost transitioned my career,” he says.
About half of Canada, mainly in the Arctic, Yukon, NWT and Nunavut, sits on permafrost — for now. Warming temperatures mean that the region shrinks every year. The implications of this are widespread.
There are three sets of problems caused by thawing permafrost, says Froese. (“Ice melts” he adds. “Permafrost, because of its organic nature, thaws.”)
The first is the impact of permafrost thaw on ecosystems of the North. The vegetation and drainage of an ecosystem can change quickly as permafrost thaws — peatlands can become wetlands. Lakes can lose their outlets and cause floods.
The second is the potential release of greenhouse gas. There are upwards of 1,500 gigatons of carbon stored in Canada’s permafrost soils. This is about twice the amount of carbon in the atmosphere right now, and some of it will be released as permafrost thaws.
The final set of problems is what the thaw means for the communities that live on and near permafrost. Houses, highways and powerlines built on thawing ground can shift, twist or get buried by landslides. As Froese points out, “This is a defining issue for Canada in the 21st century as ground temperatures continue to rise and impact the North.”
Accurate maps of permafrost are essential tools for addressing each set of problems. So how do you figure out where permafrost is distributed over five million square kilometres?
One way is to use technology. Froese collaborates with Martyn Unsworth, a geophysicist at the 海角社区 and Lindsey Heagy at the University of British Columbia, on helicopter surveys of the electrical properties of the ground to map permafrost and ground ice in the North.
“We hang a large instrument under the helicopter that looks like a torpedo,” Froese says. “It uses electromagnetic energy and then measures the frequencies as they come back. This tells you how resistive the ground is — when it’s frozen it’s very resistive. When it’s thawed it’s very conductive. We can look about 100 metres down into the ground, all while travelling more than 100 km/h and making a measurement every few metres. ”
Froese uses similar high-tech approaches to look at permafrost core samples at the 海角社区’s Permafrost Archives Science Laboratory, home to an industrial CT scanner, multi-sensor core logger, water isotope analyzers and much else besides.
These tools help Froese and other experts map permafrost across large distances. But Canada’s North is massive. This is why Froese works with local communities in the North to develop permafrost monitoring capacity on the ground.
“Over the last several years we’ve worked with Indigenous guardian programs — they are Indigenous landkeepers working in their traditional territory,” Froese says. “We work with them to train Guardians in the monitoring of permafrost, drilling of cores and recovery of ground ice samples.”
The main group Froese and his team work with is the K’asho Got’ine, who oversee a 10,000-square-kilometre Indigenous protected and conserved area in the Northwest Territories.
“We’ll soon start another collaboration in the Sahtu region,” Froese says. And there’s no time to waste. “Ground temperatures there are well above -1°C . There’s not much room for warming left.”
Clear urgency
As our planet transforms, so too does the evidence we need to understand it. The race to preserve these fragile records is not just about the past, but about equipping future generations with the knowledge they’ll need to navigate a world we can scarcely imagine.
Deep Time, Frozen Data
Ice cores at the CICL unlock the Arctic climate’s ancient and modern story
The Canadian Ice Core Lab (CICL) at the 海角社区 is a centre of research and collaboration, focused on maintaining and studying climate records and environmental chemistry in Canadian High Arctic and alpine regions. Its library of ice core samples represents tens of thousands of years of climate records. The CICL archive is for current and future researchers around the world to answer critical climate change questions, representing a climate record stretching back to 79,000 BCE. But the centre’s genesis lay in a more recent and sudden need.
Much of the CICL’s archive was collected in the 2000s and housed first in Whitehorse, then moved to Ottawa. It faced an uncertain future when federal research priorities changed and the archive was defunded.
“Martin Sharp saved the day,” says Claude Labine. “We would have lost a national treasure without him.” A 海角社区 geologist and later the founding director of the CICL, Sharp understood what was at stake. “He was able to find money to move the ice cores and build a facility,” Labine says. The orphaned collection was rescued and relocated to the 海角社区.
Labine also had a hand in “saving the day,” for ice core science. In 2018, he founded the Canadian Ice Core Archive Endowment, and it fit neatly with his own expertise and interests. Labine’s background is in industry, with the installation and maintenance of automatic weather stations in the High Arctic for Campbell Scientific Canada. “By 1987 we knew we had the climate monitoring equipment that could withstand the Polar Night,” he says, referring to the duration in winter when the sun sets and doesn’t rise again until spring.
“We have two pieces of equipment at the CICL that are unique in the world,” he says. They allow scientists to look into the ice core samples anew. And we should be looking, and paying attention. “The Arctic is a reflection of what happens in the Northern Hemisphere.” –Mifi Purvis
Want to learn more? Take a virtual tour of the Canadian Ice Core Lab at to glimpse our climate past for yourself!