Tucked away near the Wainuiomata Hill in Wellington sits quite possibly the coldest place in the country.
It's a bit of Antarctica thousands of kilometres from its home – and it helps contribute to Wellington's nickname as the "coolest little capital in the world".
GNS's Antarctic Ice Core Facility houses up to 2000 kilometres of ice core at a nippy –35C.
The ice core is recovered from the depths of polar ice sheets and travels from the frozen continent to Wellington, where it's processed and analysed by scientists all over the world to figure out how Antarctica will respond to climate change.
The facility was established in 2007 and has two storage freezers at –35 degrees. There's also a warmer working freezer at a "comfortable" -18 degrees, where they do research and hold laboratories.
Nancy Bertler is a professor at Victoria University, works at GNS Science and is an ice-core expert.
Bertler said it was probably the coldest place in New Zealand and when you step into the storage room - which is like a "nice day at Scott's Base" you see why.
A wall of warm jackets, gloves and beanies sit next to the door to freezer.
Within minutes of entering the sub-zero temperatures, wisps of your hair start to turn white and icicles form on your eyelashes.
Tall shelves are stacked with core samples - where some of the ice could be hundreds of thousands of years old.
A piece of Antarctic ice core ready to be looked at in Wellington. Photo / Emme McKay
Mission to get ice core back from Antarctica
It's not an easy process to get the cores from Antarctica back to Wellington.
"It's an enormous operation, lots of people involved and there's always problems," Bertler said.
The cores travel by ship in –40 degree refrigerated containers. Back-up generators and technicians on the ship are used to make sure it stays at that temperature.
Bertler said it can be very stressful.
"There are big waves that sometimes out the electricity on the ship and then there's no cooling.
"It's always high alert, lots of communication and from time to time you lose ice."
Bertler said their principal research focus is on climate change and sea-level rise.
Future economic and social development, environmental sustainability and infrastructural planning relies on the accurate assessment of the impact of global warming.
Ice-core records provide a history of atmospheric temperature and circulation changes tracing back many thousands of years.
That means research on how Antarctica's ice sheets could respond to a warming world is important.
Most research so far was focused around the West Antarctica ice sheet, which is mostly below sea level. Bertler said that made it susceptible to climate change.
Even though the ice sheet isn't the largest, it will give us the greatest rate of sea-level change this century, she said.
"That's absolutely fundamental for the whole world – even Switzerland will feel that, not in terms of direct sea level, but in terms of GDP."
The researchers bring the ice back from Antarctica, process and cut the core into pieces.
"We measure hundreds of thousands of samples ... even our own laboratory has over 100,000 samples, so it's a massive endeavour."
"To be able to measure that fast enough so we can actually say something about climate change before it happens, but also to pull resources and brains together and really make this important topic something that's being dealt with fast ... it involves lots of people."
While the Ice Core Facility is cool in temperature, it's also cool in the informal sense – helping to understand how Antarctica could contribute to future sea levels and the impact that would have on New Zealand and the world.
