To understand what has happened to the earth's atmosphere--and, therefore, how our climate might change in the future--some ice-core scientists in the Arctic are training their eyes directly downward. It's an incredibly important job. It's also, as the participants in the North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling (NEEM) project will attest, incredibly fun. Where else can you snowmobile all day across Olympic-quality piste, make modern art out of 200-year-old ice crystals and relax at "night" (the sun never sets during the arctic summer) with copious amounts of Carlsberg beer delivered by the U.S. Air Force? Oh, and in your downtime, you can extract ancient cores of ice that contain atmosphere from tens of thousands of years ago. "It's a cool gig," says Trevor Popp, a postdoctoral student and ice-core driller. The gig can also be downright freezing, as I discover when our visiting group (a collection of journalists, scientists and Danish environmental officials) decamps from the C-130 Hercules transport plane that brought us to NEEM. It's maybe --9