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Scientists have established the world’s first global ice archive beneath the Antarctic surface to safeguard critical records of Earth’s climate history as glacier melt increases at a worrying rate.
The facility, located near the Concordia research station on the Antarctic Plateau, will store ice cores extracted from mountain glaciers around the world, protecting them for future scientific research.
The underground sanctuary is designed to maintain these samples for centuries, providing future generations with access to invaluable climate data.
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Ice cores serve as natural time capsules, capturing ancient air, dust, aerosols and pollutants that help chart the evolution of Earth’s atmosphere over thousands of years. As global warming leads to rapid glacier loss, researchers are working quickly to save these irreplaceable records before they disappear.
The first samples housed in the archive, collected from Mont Blanc, France and Grand Combin, Switzerland, are now stored in a snow cave at a consistent minus 52C.
The shipment, amounting to 1.7 tonnes of ice, was transported over 50 days in refrigerated conditions from Italy to Antarctica.
The preservation project is led by the Ice Memory Foundation, a partnership of European research institutes founded in 2015.
To date, ice cores from 10 glacier sites worldwide have been collected, with plans to expand the archive further in the coming years.
Since the year 2000, glaciers have lost around five per cent of their global ice volume, resulting in the loss of essential climate records.
Researchers have said that preserving these cores will allow future generations, using technologies yet to be developed, to better understand how fast the climate changed and why.
Beyond environmental factors, the sanctuary’s location is intended to guarantee the neutrality of the ice cores, keeping them free from political influence and accessible to all.
It is housed at a French–Italian research station on territory governed by an international treaty, with future access to be granted exclusively on the basis of scientific merit.
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