Ice cores provide a wealth of information about past climate and environmental conditions as well as direct records of the composition of the atmosphere on timescales from decades to hundreds of millennia. This comprises deep ice cores from both polar ice sheets and from high-altitude glaciers, with the latter responding most sensitively to human interaction with the Earth system.

In October 2022 the 3rd Open Science Conference of the International Partnerships of Ice Core Sciences (IPICS) takes place in Crans-Montana, Switzerland, providing the opportunity to document the status quo of ice core research including comparative studies on other climate archives and climate models in this joint special issue of Climate of the Past and The Cryosphere: "Ice core science at the three poles".

Potential topics of contributions include the latest results from polar and high-altitude ice cores, integrative science on ice cores, climate models and other climate archives, new proxies, and other ice-core-related technology developments. In particular, we invite ice-core-related contributions on the following themes.

1. Glacial–interglacial dynamics, interglacials, and sea level
2. Holocene and the last 2000-year climate forcings and variability
3. Progress in proxy development and interpretation
4. Ice dynamics, ice sheet instability, and geophysics
5. High-alpine ice cores
6. Ice biology, basal ice, and subglacial lakes
7. Pollution records
8. Advances in drilling engineering and borehole observations
9. Timescales and methods for ice dating
10. Rapid changes and teleconnections
11. Biogeochemical cycles in the Earth system – data and models
12. New ice archives
13. The Oldest Ice challenge and the preservation of climatic signals in the deepest ice.