He and a team of professors and students from Dartmouth, the University of New Hampshire, and the University of Maine spent a month and a half drilling on Mt. Hunter this summer in order to obtain glacial ice cores from as far down as 700 feet. The samples were obtained using a solar and wind powered drill, and were then packed and flown out of the mountains. The ice will be used to study past, present, and future climate change. Osterberg says that central Alaska has been warming, both due to natural cycles and greenhouse gas. He says that some of those natural cycles are decades long, meaning that weather records, which only go back for about a century, don’t provide enough historical data.