Colorado Academy’s 10-student Middle School Robotics Team had a rare opportunity to visit the National Ice Core Laboratory in Denver in mid-October.  The U.S. National Ice Core Laboratory (NICL) is a National Science Foundation (NSF) facility for storing, curating, and studying meteoric ice cores recovered from the glaciated regions of the world. NICL provides scientists with the capability to conduct examinations and measurements on ice cores, and it preserves the integrity of these ice cores in a long-term repository for future investigations. This is the only lab in the entire USA that stores, and studies ice cores from glacial sites such as Greenland and Antarctica. It was a chance for CA students to meet with expert Richard Nunn and learn about how these ice core samples are used to study global changes and contamination in drinking water, both of which are topics that the team is researching for its robotics competitions.