UW glaciologist and ESS Professor Eric Steig was interviewed on the February 15th CBS Sunday Morning show. In the segment, “These United States: George Washington and climate change“, Steig showed CBS Environmental correspondent David Schechter around his lab (Δ*IsoLab, the isotope geochemistry laboratory in the Department of Earth and Space Sciences, which he co-leads with other ESS and Atmospheric Sciences faculty). Together they looked at an ice core dating back to 1776, at the start of the American Revolution.

The ice core was drilled from the highest point of the Greenland ice sheet. “An ice core,” said Steig in a sit-down interview, is “a sort of magical way of going back in time…it’s a time machine.”

Steig’s lab analyzes – among many other things – the concentration of rare isotopes of oxygen and hydrogen in ice cores, which can be used to determine temperatures changes back through 1776 and hundreds of thousands of years before that. Bubbles trapped within the ice contain samples of the ancient atmosphere, and measurements of those bubbles (from ice cores from Antarctica) show that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have risen dramatically since the beginning of the industrial revolution – around the same time as the birth of the United States of America. Ice cores are one of the key sources of information about how, and why, climate has changed.

“It’s good for people to understand things have changed and will continue to change and have that understanding of what to expect going forward,” said Steig.

Watch the CBS Sunday Morning segment here