The climate record -- stretching back more than 750, 000 years -- can be read in the sediments and ice layers from Asia to Greenland.
The radar sends radio wave pulses into the ice sheet, and the waves bounce off buried features, informing researchers about the characteristics of the snow and ice layers.
ENGADGET: NASA's GROVER eco-rover to examine Greenland's ice sheet (video)
According to Oskal, Finnmark is the area of Norway that is predicted to experience the largest temperature increases, raising concerns about whether ice layers will form over pastures preventing reindeer from foraging.
The project aims to help fill the current gap in existing measurement studies by satellites and submarines - which cannot differentiate between ice and snow layers.
The situation wasn't much better in many Long Island communities, where commuters woke up Monday to roads jammed with thick layers of ice and slush.
Unfortunately for snow enthusiasts, the model found that the fragile needle-like ice crystals connecting the two layers can be broken easily and separated by the weight of new snow or a skier.
To find out how warm the earth was before that, climatologists have had to resort to indirect methods, such as measuring tree-rings, or counting the different isotopes of oxygen in layers of polar ice.
They assembled the climate data by measuring the distribution of dust layers seen in two ice boreholes.
BBC: The dust loggers were sacrificed at the bottom of the holes
The water, albeit in smaller volumes, continues to flow, forming unstable layers of snow, slush and ice (see 2:08 when Gadd sinks his hooks into a piece of snow that simply crumbles away).
Some of the fine layers on Mars may have formed by the slow accumulation of dust and ice, perhaps only 100 micrometers (0.004 inches) per year.
The fear is that melting ice, along with increased snow and rain, could reduce the density and salinity of the top layers of the sea, making them more buoyant.
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