Irreplacable Data Melts Away As Scientists Hurry To Get Ice Cores From Mountain Glaciers Around The Planet

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Schwikowski, an environmental chemist at the Paul Scherrer Institut near Zurich, is the scientific lead for the Ice Memory Foundation, a collaborative group that aims to preserve glacial ice records before climate change wrecks them. Their goal is to get cores from 20 glaciers around the world in 20 years, and, starting in 2025, lock them away for long-term storage in an ice cave in the Antarctic — a natural freezer that will hold them at close to minus 60 degrees F (minus 50 degrees C). Since the program’s start in 2015 they have taken cores from eight sites, in France, Bolivia, Switzerland, Russia, Norway, and Italy. But the core attempted from Corbassière was a failure — and has the team wondering if they are already too late.

The team, watching in despair as ice cores melt and muddle, is not alone in seeing climate change wreaking havoc with scientific records — often in unexpected ways. Geologists who hunt for meteorites on the ice in Antarctica are finding their mission thwarted by warming temperatures. And while archaeologists who study the artifacts spat out by ice patches are seeing a bonanza of new finds, they are also racing to get to those objects before they rot. Other heritage sites are slumping into thawing permafrost.

What all these researchers have in common is a race to preserve what they can, while they can. When you are standing on a glacier that’s literally melting under your feet, says Schwikowski, “you really feel the urgency.”

Due to climate change, high mountain glaciers are now endangered, losing ice faster than they are gaining it. Studies of a few dozen well-monitored glaciers in the World Glacier Inventory have shown that the pace of glacial ice loss has accelerated from a few inches per year in the 1980s to nearly 3 feet per year in the 2010s. A 2023 model of some 215,000 mountain glaciers showed that nearly half of them could disappear entirely by 2100 if the world warms by just 1.5 degrees C, the ambitious maximum warming target of the Paris Agreement.

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https://e360.yale.edu/features/glacier-melt-ice-cores-artifacts-meteorites