On Wednesday, scientists inaugurated the world's first repository of mountain ice cores at Concordia Station on the Antarctic plateau. This unprecedented sanctuary preserves the history of Earth's atmosphere in frozen archives, allowing future generations to study the climate as glaciers melt at an alarming rate worldwide.
Ice cores: time capsules of the atmosphere
An ice core is a veritable time capsule, containing invaluable information about past climate changes. Faced with the rapid melting of glaciers, scientists have embarked on a race against time to collect and preserve these samples before they disappear.
A facility at -52°C to protect the samples
The Ice Memory Foundation, a consortium of European research institutes, inaugurated the sanctuary on Wednesday. The ceremony was broadcast live and showed the opening of the ice cave where the samples will be kept at a constant temperature of around -52°C. The first cores came from Mont Blanc in France and the Grand Combin in Switzerland, transported after a 50-day journey by refrigerated icebreaker and plane from Trieste, Italy.
During the ceremony, foundation members carried boxes of ice cores into the cave, dug deep into a 5-meter-high snowdrift, to ensure their long-term preservation.
Preserving climate memory for future generations
"By protecting samples of atmospheric gases, aerosols, pollutants, and dust trapped in ice, we ensure that future researchers will be able to study past climates with technologies that may not yet exist."explain Charles Barbante, vice-president of the Ice Memory Foundation and professor at Ca' Foscari University of Venice.
Since 2015, the Ice Memory Foundation, launched by a consortium of European research organizations, has identified and extracted ice cores from 10 glacial sites worldwide. These cores will be transported to the ice cave for preservation. The goal is to establish an international agreement guaranteeing their protection for decades to come.
The glaciers are melting, taking with them the history of the atmosphere.
With global warming, glaciers are disappearing rapidly, taking with them essential information about the Earth's atmosphere. According to the foundation, since 2000, glaciers have lost between 2% and 39% of their mass regionally and about 5% globally.
"These ice cores are not mere relics, they are reference points.", highlighted Celeste Saulo, Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organization. "They allow scientists, today and tomorrow, to understand what has changed, how quickly, and why."
