About 20 km of ice cores of differing drill-lengths (few tens of m to 3000 m long) are curated and stored at AWI. These cores originate mainly from Greenland and Antarctica and are derived partly by international drilling projects. Cryo-storage rooms are available in-house, but also rented from professional providers.

Cryo-rooms (-10, -15, -20 and -30°C) are available for ice core processing, sample preparation and measurements in AWI. A major part of our ice laboratories is set up for processing of ice cores: different types of vertical and horizontal band saws enable to slice the ice cores into sections to be packed for shipping to the different laboratories participating in the drilling project. Sample preparation includes further cutting, polishing and cleaning of samples. Different saws (band, wire and hand saws) as well as microtomes and a clean-bench are available.

Physical property measurement systems are installed, and temporarily removed for on-site campaigns during expeditions, such as visual stratigraphy line scanning, large area scanning macroscope, optical light microscopy and automated fabric analyser. Further cryo-applications (µCT, Raman spectroscopy) set-up in cryo-warm-room combinations enable more specialised measurements in the solid ice.

Melted ice is analysed in a Continuous flow analysis system which melts ice on a heated plate inside the cryo-room and transfers the melt water to warm environment, where chemical analysis is performed (Paleoclimate Research).