Ice cores as temporal probes

This article develops a speculative approach to thinking about the temporalities of ice. Examining the politics of ice cores as temporal probes, it argues that ice comes to matter in political and ecological terms and as the very "stuff of time". As cylinders of ice that are extracted through drilling into the deep time of extreme cryogenic environments, ice cores become speculative devices to conceive of climates past and future. An analysis of ice-coring practices and technologies as time capsules or temporal probes allows for a novel way of thinking about the temporal materialities of ice and its vibrancies and distributive agency, and how the material-semiotic entanglements of ice-coring practices become a way of listening to the call of matter.