As mountain glaciers melt at accelerating rates worldwide, the Ice Memory Foundation has opened the world’s first ice-core sanctuary in Antarctica to preserve disappearing ice for future climate research.
Since 2000, mountain glaciers have lost between 2% and 39% of their ice, depending on the region, and around 5% globally, according to the Ice Memory Foundation, raising concerns about the permanent loss of valuable climate records.
Affiliated with the University of Grenoble in the French Alps, the foundation’s mission is to preserve ice from threatened glaciers to safeguard long-term climate records.
“We have a historic responsibility today to engage with Ice Memory to build up a heritage of glacial archives for our children,” the Honorary President of the Foundation Prince Albert II of Monaco said.
From the Alps to Antarctica
In December, two Alpine ice cores extracted from the Mont Blanc (col du Dôme, France) and Grand Combin (Switzerland) arrived at Concordia Station, a remote Franco-Italian research base in Antarctica, after a journey of more than 50 days, transported under special conditions aboard an icebreaker and an aeroplane.
There, they were stored in the ice-core sanctuary, a cave 35 metres long and five metres high and wide, dug into compact layers of snow five metres below the surface.
“The extreme and naturally constant temperatures of Antarctica, close to -52°C (-61°F) all year round,” according to the association, will ensure the stability of the ice cores – long cylinders of ice extracted by drilling vertically into a glacier or ice cap.
The repository reaches deep into Antarctica. [Gaetano Massimo Maccri / PNRA IPEV]
Ice cores, a tool for the future
The preservation of ice cores “ensures that future generations of researchers will be able to study past climate conditions using technologies that may not yet exist” Carlo Barbante, vice-chair of the Ice Memory Foundation, explained.
Ice cores contain air bubbles, dust, pollutants, isotopes and other particles that have been trapped for hundreds to thousands of years.
This “priceless legacy for future generations” will enable future scientists to reconstruct past climates, atmospheric changes, temperature cycles, CO2 and other gas concentrations, and even historical volcanic events and fires.
(aw)