Councillors Eleanor Macy and Lorna Spenceley joined around 50 staff and residents in Harlow's Civic Centre to hear for themselves what impact our lifestyles are having on the planet.

Eleanor welcomed Dr Rob Mulvaney from the British Antarctic Survey, who spoke about his work with fellow scientists gathering evidence from deep within the polar ice caps of Antarctica.

Dr Mulvaney has spent 14 summer seasons in Antarctica, living in tents for up to three months at a time while drilling ice cores, and measuring sheet thickness and flow. He has worked on glaciers in Greenland, Alaska, Spitsbergen and Sweden.

He showed the audience two samples of ice - one a thousand years old, the other considerably older - and the trapped bubbles in it which provide evidence of how our climate has changed. The evidence shows that the present rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which lead to climate change, are due to our lifestyle and not part of the earth's naturally varying climate. Eleanor says:

"The talk was very interesting and gives us all something to think about with our lifestyles and the effect our daily actions are having on the planet. It was fascinating to hear that by drilling deep into the polar ice caps scientists can see what the climate was like up to 500,000 years ago."

The event was organised to mark World Environment Day. It also forms part of Harlow Council's Environment Week, organised to raise awareness of what local people can do to help protect the environment and the planet.

The British Antarctic Survey is part of the Natural Environment Research Council. Based in Cambridge, it has, for almost 60 years, undertaken the majority of Britain's scientific research on and around the Antarctic continent. It now shares that continent with scientists from around thirty countries.