Antarctic vault opens to safeguard mountain ice cores as glaciers melt
Scientists inaugurated the first global storage facility for mountain ice cores at Antarctica’s Concordia station, aiming to protect climate records from disappearing glaciers.
A new Antarctic sanctuary, created by the Ice Memory Foundation, was officially opened at Concordia station to store mountain ice cores for posterity. Boxes of cores drilled from France’s Mont Blanc and Switzerland’s Grand Combin were delivered via a refrigerated icebreaker and aircraft after a 50-day journey from Trieste. Inside a cave buried in a five-meter snow drift, the samples now rest at a constant -52°C, preserving atmospheric gases, aerosols, pollutants and dust.
Vice chair Carlo Barbante highlighted that future technologies will benefit from these physical records. The initiative, begun in 2015 by a consortium that includes CNRS, IRD, University of Grenoble-Alpes, CNR, Ca’ Foscari University and the Paul Scherrer Institute, aims to collect cores from ten glacier sites and develop an international convention for their safeguarding. U.N. World Meteorological Organisation secretary-general Celeste Saulo called the cores essential reference points for understanding past climate change.
Why it matters
Preserving ice cores safeguards vital climate data before rapid glacier loss erases it.
In this story
