World’s first ice vault opens to save climate history

Dubai: Deep beneath Antarctica’s frozen surface, scientists have opened the world’s first global ice archive designed to preserve vital records of Earth’s changing climate as glaciers rapidly melt worldwide. The underground sanctuary, located near the Concordia research station on the Antarctic Plateau, will store ice cores drilled from mountain glaciers worldwide, safeguarding them for centuries to come.

Ice cores act as natural time capsules, trapping ancient air, dust, aerosols and pollutants that reveal how Earth’s atmosphere and climate evolved over thousands of years. With global warming accelerating glacier loss, researchers are racing to save these irreplaceable records before they vanish.

The first samples, extracted from Mont Blanc in France and Grand Combin in Switzerland, are now stored in a snow cave maintained at a constant temperature of around minus 52 degrees Celsius. The 1.7 tonnes of ice arrived after a 50-day refrigerated journey from Italy to Antarctica.

The project is led by the Ice Memory Foundation, a consortium of European research institutes launched in 2015. Scientists have already drilled ice cores from 10 glacier sites worldwide and plan to add more in the coming years.

Since 2000, glaciers have lost about 5 per cent of their ice globally, erasing crucial climate data. Researchers say preserving these cores will allow future generations, using technologies yet to be developed, to better understand how fast the climate changed and why.

Video and inputs from AFP