EDITOR’S NOTE: Call to Earth is a NCS editorial sequence dedicated to reporting on the environmental challenges dealing with our planet, along with the options. Rolex’s Perpetual Planet Initiative has partnered with NCS to drive consciousness and schooling round key sustainability points and to encourage constructive motion.
Beneath Antarctica’s countless white plateau, hidden deep inside the snow, lies a priceless archive of the world’s local weather reminiscence.
The vault isn’t made of metal or concrete. There are not any safety methods or buzzing freezers. Instead, the sanctuary is carved straight into the Antarctic snow close to Concordia Research Station, a distant Franco-Italian outpost greater than 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) from the nearest shoreline.
Inside the frozen cave, scientists are storing cylinders of historic ice extracted from some of the world’s most endangered mountain glaciers. Within the ice are information of previous local weather historical past — from volcanic eruptions and wildfire smoke to industrial air pollution and shifting atmospheric circumstances stretching again centuries, typically millennia.
The mission, led by the Ice Memory Foundation, goals to protect items of these glaciers earlier than rising temperatures erase them.
“It’s a unique location. It’s a unique idea. It’s really a first in many aspects,” Thomas Stocker, president of the basis and professor of local weather and environmental physics at the University of Bern, Switzerland, instructed NCS.
“We cannot save the entire glacier, but we can save the environmental and climate information that is stored in these glaciers.”
That info is preserved in microscopic air bubbles trapped inside the ice. “These bubbles are full of atmospheric air from the time this bubble was formed — maybe a hundred years, a thousand years, a million years back in time,” he mentioned.
Scientists can analyze these bubbles to reconstruct historic concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and different greenhouse gases. Stocker mentioned ice core information have revealed that at this time’s carbon dioxide ranges are 30% to 35% larger than at any level in the final 800,000 years. But information containing different necessary info are fading away.
“I’m living in Switzerland, so we have observed for many decades that the glaciers are retreating at an accelerating pace,” he mentioned. “The local climate archives, such as in Alpine glaciers or in glaciers in the Himalayas or in the Andes, are disappearing at an alarmingly accelerating rate.”
Globally, hundreds of glaciers have disappeared in current many years and by the center of the century, up to 4,000 glaciers might vanish every year if people proceed to drive local weather change, based on a 2025 study. Roughly a decade in the past, as the scale of glacier loss grew to become more and more clear, scientists developed the thought for the Ice Memory archives. Since then, groups have traveled round the world drilling and transporting fragile cores to Antarctica, the place the continent’s pure chilly can protect them for hundreds of years.
Collecting and transporting the samples to Antarctica whereas holding them frozen and uncontaminated is a complicated activity that usually requires expeditions into some of Earth’s harshest environments.
Scientists haul practically 1,000 kilos of drilling gear onto high-altitude terrain. In Tajikistan, one current drilling marketing campaign passed off at 5,820 meters (19,094 ft) above sea stage.
“You can imagine how difficult the working conditions for the drillers and the scientists who went there must have been,” Stocker mentioned.
A cylindrical drill fitted with ring-shaped cutters bores into the glacier, extracting a vertical core of ice layer by layer. The deeper the core, the older the local weather historical past it comprises.
But earlier than any drilling begins, scientists spend months surveying glaciers utilizing ground-penetrating radar to determine the most steady areas, the place the inside ice layers stay undisturbed.
“When we do this radar survey, it’s basically like looking at a photograph of the whole internal structure of the ice, from your feet, all the way to the bedrock interface below,” Alison Criscitiello, director of the Canadian Ice Core Lab at the University of Alberta, who’s not concerned with the Ice Memory Foundation, instructed NCS.
An worldwide community of scientists and establishments has spent many years gathering, storing and finding out ice cores from glaciers and polar ice sheets round the world.
“There are places on the planet with critical climate records that are being lost every single day,” she mentioned. “Every day that goes by where melt is occurring in these kinds of places, more time is lost from that climate record.”
Organizations together with the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado Boulder in the US, the British Antarctic Survey, the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) preserve huge archives of frozen samples drilled from Antarctica, Greenland and mountain glaciers. International collaborations resembling the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica (EPICA) and Beyond EPICA have used these cores to reconstruct Earth’s local weather historical past stretching again lots of of hundreds of years.
But whereas most ice-core analysis has centered on understanding previous local weather change, the Ice Memory Foundation provides a new dimension: preserving an archive of endangered glaciers earlier than they vanish.
Scientists selected the space close to Concordia Research Station exactly as a result of temperatures there stay low sufficient for ice cores to be preserved naturally, with out the want for complicated refrigeration methods.
Sitting excessive on the Antarctic plateau at greater than 3,000 meters (9,800 ft) above sea stage, Concordia is one of the coldest and most remoted analysis stations on Earth. During the Antarctic winter, temperatures can plunge beneath minus 80 levels Celsius (minus 112 Fahrenheit), and the station is minimize off from the outdoors world for months at a time.
“This is really a safe place. We make it even safer by carving out a cave that is 10 meters (33 feet) below the surface,” Stocker mentioned. “At that cave, in that location, we have this constant minus 52 degrees Celsius (minus 61.6 degrees Fahrenheit). The cave is protected by a snow cover; it’s essentially a vault, but it’s made out of compacted snow.”
During development, a trench was excavated and an inflatable balloon positioned inside to carry the area for the vault whereas scientists compacted snow round it. Once the construction was secured, the balloon was eliminated, abandoning a completed tunnel-like cave that stretches 60 meters (197 ft) lengthy and 5 meters (16 ft) extensive.
Inside the vault, the cylindrical ice cores are saved in white insulated containers, stacked in lengthy rows, with every one rigorously labeled.
The basis goals to protect ice cores from 20 glaciers round the world. Ten have already been drilled, together with cores from the Alps, the Andes and the Pamir Mountains in Tajikistan.
“Ice cores contain global climate information, so there are certain things that every single ice core on Earth will contain,” Criscitiello mentioned. “But ice cores also contain an enormous wealth of very local climate information.”
That info consists of knowledge on wildfire exercise, environmental contamination, monsoon methods and regional water provides. “These are climate records that will not exist anymore,” Criscitiello mentioned.
Stocker mentioned Switzerland’s glaciers have already misplaced roughly 35% of their quantity, with projections suggesting that as much as 90% of low-lying glaciers might disappear by the finish of the century in a high- emissions state of affairs.
The worth of the ice cores archived at this time will proceed to develop, as future generations broaden the limits of present know-how, Stocker mentioned.
“We can measure things today that we never imagined 50 years ago,” he mentioned. “So we believe that in about 50 years or 100 years from now, the next generations of scientists will be able to extract totally new information from these ice cores that we preserve for them today.”