A team of scientists from France, Italy, and Norway will begin an expedition on Tuesday to drill into the ice covering the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. Their goal is to collect cylindrical ice cores 125 meters long, in one-meter slices, to preserve climatic and environmental data from the past 300 years. The team of eight scientists, a drilling specialist, and a mountain guide will set up camp at 1,100 meters above sea level in the Holtedahlfonna region, which is full of dangerous crevasses and has temperatures ranging from -25°C to -5°C.
The initiative, called Ice Memory, seeks to recover and preserve climate and environmental data from places such as the Alps, Andes, Caucasus, and Altai for future generations of scientists. Ice Memory’s president, Jérôme Chappellaz, said that the raw material of glaciologists is rapidly disappearing and that it is the responsibility of his generation to preserve at least some of this material.
The cylinder samples will be analyzed immediately, while the second will be stored at the French-Italian base of Concordia, in the Antarctic, which has an average temperature of -50°C. The goal is to preserve the planet’s climate archives, which are trapped in the tiny air bubbles in the ice. The team has twenty days to extract the cylinders, which have a diameter of 10 cm, and plans to carry out extractions at a total of twenty sites around the world. High-latitude glaciers, such as those in the Arctic, are disappearing at a rapid rate due to global warming, and it is important to preserve this valuable data before they disappear completely.