The Eisgruppe (Ice Group) is one out of nine branches of the Institute for Environmental Physics. The Ice Group specifically  deals with environmental aspects of the cryosphere comprising here the continental regions permanently covered by snow. Major efforts are directed towards the reconstruction of past environmental and climate changes contained in glacier archives.To approach this task ice cores from high elevated Alpine glaciers, from Greenland and Antarctica are investigated for various atmospheric components and isotopic ice composition deposited in a layered sequence. To finally depict dated records in terms of past atmospheric changes basic glacio-meteorologicalfield work at the drill site as well as air chemical studies of the overlying background aerosol body are performed additionally.