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Nazrin Abdul

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The Ice Memory Foundation has inaugurated a unique preservation site in Antarctica to safeguard mountain ice cores that could otherwise disappear due to climate change. The facility is designed to store the samples for centuries under natural deep-freeze conditions, AzerNEWS reports.

The ice cores, cylinders measuring about 10 centimeters in diameter and one meter or more in length, are being kept inside a specially excavated ice cave. The first samples were extracted from two rapidly shrinking Alpine glaciers.

According to The Guardian, the cores were transported by sea and, after a 50-day journey, delivered to the French-Italian Concordia research station located high on the Antarctic Plateau. The Concordia Station experiences an average temperature of –52°C, with January highs reaching only –12°C. Inside the sun-shielded ice cave, temperatures drop even lower, creating ideal long-term storage conditions.

The Ice Memory Foundation aims to collect, preserve, and manage ice cores from vanishing glaciers around the world, protecting the invaluable climate records trapped within them for future generations. These cores, some containing climate data spanning thousands of years, hold tiny bubbles of ancient atmosphere that reveal how Earth’s climate has changed over centuries. They also contain pollen traces that document shifts in plant life and can even capture evidence of historic events, such as increased lead pollution during the Roman Empire.

As the climate crisis intensifies and glaciers continue to retreat globally, scientists are racing against time to extract ice cores from melting sites and secure them in the Antarctic ice vault before this irreplaceable archive is permanently lost.