This frozen Antarctic vault will hold the remains of Earth’s vanishing glaciers

Last winter, after a 50-day ocean voyage from Italy’s coast to the East Antarctic Plateau, two samples of glacier ice from the European Alps arrived at Antarctica’s Concordia Station.

Inside the French and Italian-run station, the samples were shelved inside the Ice Memory Sanctuary, a new Antarctic lab carved into an icy cave that functions like a bank vault for glacier landscapes that might soon vanish. Here, ice cores from the world's most endangered and data-rich mountain glaciers will be kept safe so that they can be studied in the future.

“It’s a responsibility we all share. Saving these ice archives is not only a scientific responsibility, it is a legacy for humanity,” says Anne-Catherine Ohlmann, the director of the Ice Memory Foundation (IMF), the organization running the sanctuary.

Glaciers function like climate archives, trapping the gases, aerosols, and pollutants from ancient atmospheres between layers of compressed ice. By better understanding past climates, scientists hope they can more accurately forecast how the climate will change in the future.  

The first cores—420 feet drilled from France’s Mont Blanc’s Col du Dôme and 325 feet drilled from Switzerland’s Grand Combin mountain—weigh a collective 1.7 tons and will be joined by more cores from the European Alps as well as samples from Tajikistan, Bolivia, Svalbard, and potentially Russia.

Mountain glaciers hold vanishing climate archives

A UNESCO report predicted that one-third of glaciers found at World Heritage sites, including Yosemite National Park in the U.S., the Dolomites in Italy, and Kilimanjaro National Park in Tanzania will melt by 2050. If the Earth’s warming can’t be limited to 1.5°C, a target set by the Paris Climate Agreement in 2016, even more glaciers are expected to melt. Currently, the world has warmed by 1.3°C.

To retrieve the record of past climates contained within a glacier or ice sheet, scientists drill holes through layers of ice to the bedrock, extracting cylinders that range from 300 to 500 feet long. When cores are drilled for the Ice Memory Sanctuary, one sample is shipped to Antarctica while a second sample is sent to a university or research institute’s laboratory.

The ice closest to the top contains a record of how humans have been shaping Earth’s atmosphere in recent decades.

“The latest chapter in these archives—of carbon dioxide racing to unprecedented concentrations—tells a story that will, without intervention, spell the end of these history books,” says Tom Matthews, a climate scientist at Kings College London and National Geographic Explorer.

Because glacier melt can’t be stopped without dramatic action taken to stop climate change, the Ice Memory Sanctuary is a last resort for scientists hoping to preserve this knowledge.

“Preserving ice cores maintains the potential for them to be read by future generations of scientists, so that we can continue learning about how the earth’s frozen reaches respond as the planet warms,” says Matthews

Matthews and others hope that future advances in the technology and techniques used to study ice cores could lead to new discoveries.

“Fifty or 100 years from now, scientists will have analytical capabilities we cannot even imagine today,” says Thomas Stocker, IMF chair and professor emeritus of climate and environmental physics at the University of Bern, Switzerland.

Stocker thinks scientists could one day learn unprecedented insights into how air moves around the planet and how water moves among the oceans, atmosphere, and land. On a hotter planet, these cycles can dramatically change. Precise measurements of the chemical signals in ice could help scientists understand how Earth’s climate systems work and could test their climate models, he explains.

The IMF has identified five additional sites for core drilling between now and 2036: the Pacific Coastal Mountains that extend from British Columbia to Alaska, the Andes in South America, Svalbard in Norway, the Subantarctic Islands, and the Hindu Kush Himalaya. With these additional samples, scientists estimate they’ll have 300,000 years of data in total.

Building a natural refrigerator

Despite racing time to collect ice cores, the project’s ambition demands glacial pace. Since 2015, the Sanctuary’s leaders have navigated complex diplomatic, logistical, and financial obstacles. One drilling project on Kilimanjaro failed when a permit could not be obtained.

Drilling ice at high altitudes is challenging and expensive—as is keeping the cylinders frozen on journeys thousands of miles across land and ocean. Fragile cores must move from mountain peaks to the southern polar region, crossing the balmy tropics along the way.

Travelling by porter, snowmobile, helicopter, vehicle, ship, and plane, the cores are cut into meter-long sections, and chilled at -4°F in sealed boxes and large refrigerated containers.

The IMF selected Antarctica's interior as the safest location for the sanctuary because it’s currently Earth’s coldest and most stable location, both climatically and politically. While the continent is losing ice due to climate change, most melting occurs in western Antarctica and on the continent’s Peninsula.

Near the Concordia station, cores are housed within an ice cave that doesn’t need electricity to maintain a refrigerator-like environment. To build it, a machine carved a corridor 30 feet deep and 115 feet long into the plateau. For the large interior room where ice is held, staff deposited excavated ice on top of a cylinder-shaped balloon, which formed a cave 16 feet high and wide before it deflated.

Part igloo, part wine cellar, the facility naturally maintains a constant temperature of around -61°F at an altitude of 10,600 feet. The structure will compress over time as ice slowly deforms and flows under its own weight, and a new cave will eventually need to be carved.

Safeguarding a global scientific heritage

It may be many generations down the line until scientists study the ice cores, and the IMF is still creating a framework for granting access to researchers.

The 1959 Antarctic Treaty permits use of the continent “for peaceful purposes only,” with freedom of scientific investigation. Per the treaty, cooperation is encouraged and findings must be openly shared globally.

Yet the IMF says there are still unanswered questions over who will legally own the ice cores long term.

“Currently, there is no legal status for our ice cores, so we must create one,” Ohlmann says. “We are very dependent on collaboration and international diplomacy.”

Ohlmann believes the project is a hopeful example of cross-border scientific—and human—cooperation.

“We are the last generation that can act,” she says. "We are confident that scientists in a few generations will provide knowledge to policymakers to make good decisions.”