The main focus of the 109th Airlift Wing is to support the National Science Foundation, a group best known for ice core drilling. A new project began last year with the ambitious goal of drilling 12,000 feet into the ice. The findings will give scientists a glimpse of what atmospheric conditions were like 130,000 years ago. In part four of our series, reporter Kaitlyn Ross climbed down into a snow cave to see how the process works.

  To view our videos, you need to
enable JavaScript. Learn how.
install Adobe Flash 9 or above. Install now.

Then come back here and refresh the page.

NEEM Site Manager Jorgen Pedersteffensen said, "As we travel down with depth, we travel back in time, and we're able to unlock the information stored in the ice."

To solve the puzzle, the NSF is digging more than 12,000 feet down, looking at ice that dates back 130,000 years.

Pedersteffensen said, "We are trying to map out the climate history of earth but also at the same time to map out mankind's early history."

Center Coordinator Sune Olander Rsmussen said, "It's both the curiousness of understanding past climate and the dynamics of past climates, but also to improve our ability to figure out what will happen next."

Sune and Jorgen started the project in 2008, though they've both been involved in ice coring for years.

Living on the site, the project won't wrap until 2013, and research on the data they gather will continue long after that.

Rsmussen said, "It's a big thing, but it's the way to go if you want the information for the time period we're interested in."

The longest part of the process is the drilling itself. After they retrieve the ice they want, it only takes about 10 minutes to pull the ice back up to the surface, and then it's analyzed quickly after that.

Rsmussen said, "It's a pretty direct link between the people working with past climate and the people doing future climate projections."

They want to get their hands on one time period in particular. Known as the Eemian period, they say the climate 130,000 years ago is remarkably similar to what we're seeing today. There were rapid climate changes during that time - more than 20 degrees in just 50 years, before the earth started to cool again. And while it's the best model the scientists have to project future warming trends, they say global warming is an entirely different issue.

Rsmussen said, "It's definitely a big issue, but we don't work on global warming. We work on past climate, past cooling. We work on understanding past climate so we can improve our knowledge about climate in general."

Although Rsmussen acknowledges that the first question he's asked is always about global warming, he stays neutral on the politically charged debate. Advocacy groups on both sides of the isle have used the Greenlandic ice sheet to argue their point in both directions. His research, however, is focused on the past.

He said, "We as ice core people do not work with future climate. It's all about the ice archive, going back and figuring out how the conditions were."

What the conditions will be depend on who you ask. The data is in the ice for the people doing the drilling. And for those forecasting the future, they only have the ice to rely on.