Finding a way to determine past temperature records has become increasingly important as global climate change develops into one of the prevalent challenges facing our modern world. Our climate is changing, we must discover whether the changes we are experiencing now have had precedents in the past.

Climatology researchers have extracted ice cores from glaciers and ice sheets around the world. By finding stable isotope ratios from these ice cores, they can determine temperature data going back over 400,000 years.

You have recently joined a team researching past temperature trends in Greenland. But before you can begin testing, you need to have a basic understanding of what's going on.