My students enjoy fishing, hunting, and hiking during the warm weather with skiing and other snow related sports during the winter. Butte is home of a large pit that contains a lake consisting of sulfuric acid which is a result of an open pit copper mine that is now closed. We still have some mining going on in the town but it is trying to change to a service community and is inviting manufacturing companies to open their businesses there. We have a local college, Montana Tech of the University of Montana, that speciallizes in engineering courses where most of our college bound students end up going to school. I was part of a research team working at Siple Dome, Antarctica, collecting and analyzing ice cores.
Ice cores offer important clues to Earth's past climate.
As snow particles land, they trap pockets of air between them. These air pockets get buried as more snow accumulates on top. Eventually they are isolated from exchange with the atmosphere, thus preserving a sample of air from a time gone past. Ice sheets can be a few kilometers thick and can contain ice that fell as snow over 100,000 years ago. By drilling through the ice and collecting a core, we sample the record of Earth's changing atmosphere.