The National Science Foundation Ice Core Facility (NSF-ICF) provides researchers with the capability to conduct examinations and measurements on ice cores, and it preserves the integrity of these ice cores in a long-term repository for future investigations.

Analyzing ice core samples, typically removed from an ice sheet, serves as an effective method of determining weather patterns over many millennia. Existing ice sheets, or high mountain glaciers, document in various ways the record of hundreds of thousands of years of past climate recorded in compressed ancient snow. The increasing weight of overlying layers compresses the deeply buried snow into ice while preserving the annual bands of ancient snowfall.

Researchers recover and investigate ice core samples for a variety of reasons. Perhaps the main effort focuses on the reconstruction of past climate states of our planet. In an era of environmental awareness and concern, scientific investigation and research into past climate fluctuations informs us of the mechanisms which bring about climate change. Hopefully, the findings will inform the public and policy makers of any actions necessary to preserve a healthy environment.

For archaeology, such research assists in the dating of artifacts and events. As the ice core records peaks of high acidity caused by major volcanic eruptions, the evidence preserved in the ice core provides a scientific means of verifying the traditional date of the eruption of Thera (now Santorini). In the late twentieth century, research using ice core samples from the ice sheet in central Greenland, archived in the National Ice Core Laboratory, suggested that chronologies based upon a 1500 BCE eruption required some rethinking. While the matter of the absolute dating of the Thera eruption remains a matter of scholarly debate, the ice core evidence suggests the eruption occurred at least a century earlier than the traditional chronology for the first half of the late Bronze Age. The eruption provides a fixed point for aligning the chronology due to presence of late Mycenaean pottery throughout the eastern Mediterranean region.

Recovery of climate history involves drilling cores in the ice, some of them over 3,500 meters (11,000 feet) deep, from the ice cores and thick mountain glaciers including the Himalayas in Asia, the  Andes in Peru and Bolivia, and Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania.

Firn, young and shallow snow, forms the top layer of the ice sheet. Packed into coarse and granular crystals, firn, usually at a depth of 150 to 200 feet (45 to 60 m), is the boundary between snow and ice. Under the firn lies the older deeper snow is compacted into ice. An ice sheet is only a few metres thick at the ice fringe, but can extend more than 10,500 feet (3,200 metres) (10,500 feet). Unfortunately, the bottom of a core rocks, sand, and silt discolor and compromise the probative value of the ice.

When researchers lower an ultra-precise thermometer into a hole in the ice, they can detect the temperature variations. Near-surface ice temperature reads warm. As the thermometer descends the temperature drops into the layers formed roughly between 1450 and 1850 CE. Deeper in the ice sheet the temperature warms again followed by the temperatures of the Ice Age. The bottom layers of the ice sheet are warmed by heat emitted by the Earth. In addition to discerning and cataloging the compressed annual bands or layers into a chronological framework other markers such as radiation traces, dust particles, the concentration of carbon-dioxide and methane in the bubbles, and argon and potassium gas contained in the bubbles provide additional dating data.