Visualization of 200,000 Year History of Global Change

The trapped air bubbles in ice contain a record of the past atmosphere and past changes. A major nationwide cooperative effort involving eleven universities and four research institutes recovered a two mile long ice core (cylinder of ice drilled out of glaciers and polar ice sheets) in the central plateau of the Greenland ice sheet. The resultant record covers a period of 200,000 years, and provides a multivariate time-series record documenting climatic and atmospheric change and forcing. This case study describes several experimental visualization techniques developed for scientists at the University of New Hampshire to study the major ions of the ice core. These tools support both spatial and temporal data analysis, and can be applied to a wide variety of time-series data. 1 Introduction The air in our atmosphere contains compounds such as sulfate (SO 4 ), nitrate (NO 3 ), other ions, dust, radioactive fallout, and trace metals. When snow falls, it carries all these compounds with i..