Convener: Valter Maggi This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Co-Conveners: Samuel Albani, Robert Moulvaney, Jefferson Cardia Simões

Polar and high mountain glaciers provide information about past climate and environmental conditions on timescales from decades to hundreds of millennia, as well as direct records of the composition of the atmosphere. Ice cores contain highly detailed continuous stratigraphic records extending from the present to 800 ka BP. A large variety of climate proxies, related to atmospheric and climate changes can be analyzed and dated with an accuracy ranging from a few years, for recent centuries, to a few millennia for older records. Over the past two decades, the contribution of ice core studies to the reconstruction and interpretation of past climate changes became fundamental: they allowed the direct measurement of greenhouse gas changes in the past and the detection of rapid climatic changes.