There is as much water locked up in Canada's glaciers and ice caps as there is in liquid form in all our rivers and lakes. For 90% of the last few million years Canada has been under several kms of ice sheet, the last continental-scale glaciation having just departed about 10,000 years ago. The small GSC group of 5 scientists and 3 chemists / technical staff studies this frozen half of Canada's water resource.

The Western glaciers are young, warm, active and contribute quickly and directly to Western watersheds. Monitoring and understanding their past, present and possible future state helps us respond to the immediate and future problems of having adequate freshwater for irrigation, hydro-power generation, domestic and industrial consumption, and ecosystem functioning. Key western glaciers have been monitored continuously since the mid-1960s. With climate change the balance between liquid and solid water is changing in Canada and end users will be effected by the shifting balance.

The Northern Arctic glaciers and ice caps are much colder, older and isolated from most Canadians needs. However because of this they are invaluable repositories of climate history. Each of the last 100,000 years has left its layer of snow-turned-to-ice that can be sampled with a coring drill. The analysis of the cores tells us about the ancient temperatures, accumulation, summer melting, pollen rain and air chemistry. The group has been in the forefront of this sort of climate research using ice cores and in the interpretation of the paleoclimate histories. Monitoring the health and impurity content of key glaciers in the Arctic has gone on every year since the early 1960s. These results taken in conjunction with the ice core records have allowed us to trace the timing and amount of human induced climate and atmospheric pollution.