That John is absolutely wild! Could not imagine working in a -36° environment. Gorgeous pictures when you put your light under that brings out the colors. Fascinating!
Excellent question! Many answers. Traditionally, I would say these types of features are important to understand as they can indicate that the stratigraphy of the annual layering has been disturbed. We use preserved horizontal stratigraphy to literally count layers, and date the ice cores. If layering has been sheared, overturned, or deformed, it can lead to incorrect dating (and mis-interpretation of climate events). Near the bed of a thick ice sheet, the ice can behave strangely as it moves over the bumps and topography of the bedrock....leading to these types of features. More fundamentally (and from a materials science perspective), there's also a lot we still don't fully understand about grain-scale behavior in ice, so looking at well-preserved and extreme examples like this help fill in that picture of how ice deforms (i.e. enhanced creep, recrystallization, regelation, etc.). The better we understand physical behavior of ice across domains, the better we can build our ice dynamics models and make predictions. For me specifically with this piece of ice...I am actually going to use it for an entirely different purpose. We are testing new instruments, and need to see if those instruments can correctly identify anomalous features like this...so it's effectively being used as a testing sample. My graduate school advisor actually wrote an entire paper about this exact fold in the Greenland ice core back in 1997 (literally the same one). It goes into excruciating detail about why these features are important: agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1029/96JC03836
