Taking a close look at an ice core from Baker Glacier.
Once they had been flown down to the airport, the ice core boxes were stored in a large freezer at the Hermitage Hotel, before being transported by freezer truck to the GNS ice core facility in Lower Hutt.
Although there was a lot of interesting information that could be found out during the analysis of the ice cores in terms of things like accumulation rates at the different locations, the time span that they covered was not as much as we had hoped due to the very high annual precipitation and accumulation of snow in the mountains.
The cores also showed quite a lot of mixing between the layers, due to meltwater percolation from the generally warm temperatures.
There are glaciated areas in the Southern Alps that are higher altitude (therefore colder) than the ones where we drilled. Unfortunately they are all too steep and too thin, so would not have enough ice to give any longer term records.
Here is an interview I did with Jim Mora on National Radio’s Afternoons programme