Buried within glaciers is a history of ancient ecosystems, including microbes and viruses past. Some of the airborne microbes and viruses that populate our atmosphere are often carried by snowflakes or dust onto the surface of glaciers. By studying glacial ice cores, scientists can reconstruct histories of microbes and viruses and the climatic and environmental conditions they experienced. Two problems that plague current methods of analyzing ice cores are contamination and low microbe biomass. To address these challenges, researchers recently developed a method for decontaminating ice core surfaces and extracting clean inner ice to study microbes and viruses. When applied to ice from the Guliya ice cap on the Tibetan Plateau in China, the method revealed a unique viral community of mostly novel taxa, providing the first window into viral genomes, communities, and functions in ancient glacier environments. These frozen viruses likely originate from soil or plants and facilitate nutrient acquisition for their hosts. Broadly, this work extends the knowledge of ancient ecosystems that were archived in glacier ice. The protocol developed for microbial/viral extraction from high-elevation, cold, and dry environments may one day be applied in the search for life in the Martian polar regions, as well in other icy worlds in our solar system, and perhaps even project trends of future climate change here on Earth.