Global warming has made ice a hot topic, and one sizzling center of inquiry is in a warehouse-like complex in New England, where melting polar shores and shrinking glaciers are issues of urgent study.
HANOVER, N.H. -- Global warming has made ice a hot topic, and one sizzling center of inquiry is in a warehouse-like complex in New England, where melting polar shores and shrinking glaciers are issues of urgent study.
In vast deep-freeze rooms at the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, parka-clad scientists examine samples taken from Greenland and Antarctica, some of them icy, some made up of old, close-packed snow known as firn.
Another building creates cold-weather road surfaces and lets vehicles drive across them. Elsewhere on the base, researchers set up supermarket-size models of rivers and seashores to check the impact of ice and cold.
Recently, it has become a practical laboratory to monitor the effects of climate change in the Arctic, notably a way to keep ice and newly open water from eroding seaside communities.
"We've never had a shore protection system for the Arctic," said Leonard Zabilansky, a research civil engineer at the lab. "We've never had to." Now this protection is needed.
Because the lab is part of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, it focuses on both military and civilian consequences from climate change.