What if you could study a frozen moment in time?

What would you want to know?

In Denver, Colorado, there's a lab where scientists collect frozen pieces of time.

We can very clearly see when the Industrial Revolution happened.

We can even look at lead concentrations and we can see when the Romans started smelting lead.

We can see when we started using leaded gasoline.

We can see when we banned lead of gasoline because the concentration of these lead particulates

within the dust particles trapped in the ice vary.

And we have the ability to actually look at these incredibly trace molecules

and determine these sorts of events.

These scientists travel the world and they collect samples of ice,

these frozen fossils of our environment,

that can show us how the Earth has changed over time.

I'm Dylan Thuris and this is Atlas Obscira, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places.

Today we're going to the National Science Foundation Ice Corps facility, where science peers into the depths of ice

to tell us about our past and our future.

That is after this. So my name is Richard Nunn. I'm the assistant curator at the National Science Foundation Ice Corps facility here in Lakewood, Colorado.

In case you miss that, that is Richard Nunn, the curator of the National Science Foundation Ice Corps facility.

And the thing that Richard curates is the ice.

Lots and lots of ice. I maintain a database that tracks all 22,000

meters that we have, all of the like several hundred thousand individual pieces that have been cut

over the years. I'm basically a glorified librarian. As my partner likes to call me, I'm her ice librarian

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