Soon, world’s first library of ice archives to come up in Antarctica

Starting 15 August until the beginning of September, an international team of around ten glaciologists and engineers - French, Italian, Russian and American - will be travelling to the Col du Dome (4,300 m or 14,108 feett) on Europe's highest peak, Mont Blanc to drill ice cores. They are part of the unique Protecting Ice Memory project, which is aimed at drawing out long tubes of ice from glaciers for their preservation in Antarctica. The purpose is to build the world's first library of ice archives extracted from glaciers which are threatened by global warming.

"In the coming decades, or even centuries, this ice archive will be invaluable - be it for entirely unprecedented scientific discoveries or for understanding local changes in the environment," said Jean Jouzel, climatologist and Vice-Chair of the IPCC, 2002-2015.

Three ice cores, each measuring 130 meters in length, will be extracted and lowered into the valley by helicopter before being transported to the LGGE in Grenoble, while maintaining a strict cold chain throughout the process. One core will be analysed in 2019 to begin building a database available to the entire world scientific community. The other two will be transported by ship before being transferred onto tracked vehicles on the high plateaus of Antarctica in 2020 for storage at the Concordia station, which is run by French and Italian scientists. The long-term plan is to have dozens of ice core archives stored in a snow cave at -54°C , which is the most reliable and natural freezer in the world.

The Col du Dome glacier represents the first step in this major project, originally launched in 2015 by the LGGE, Ca' Foscari University of Venice (Italy) and the CNR (Italian National Research Council), backed by the Universite Grenoble Alpes Foundation. A second, longer and more complex operation will be carried out in 2017 on the Illimani glacier in the Bolivian Andes. A number of other countries are already candidates to join this project and protect the memory of the glaciers to which they have access: Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Brazil, the United States, Russia, China, Nepal and Canada.

The idea to create this project was born when scientists observed a rise in temperatures on several glaciers. At ten-year intervals, the temperature near to the glaciers on the Col du Dome and Illimani in the Andes has risen between 1.5° and 2°. At the current rate, their surface will undergo systematic melting over the summer in the next few years and decades. Due to this melting and the percolation of meltwater through the underlying layers of snow, these are unique pages in the history of our environment which will be lost forever.

"We are the only community of scientists working on climate to see a chunk of its archives disappearing. We urgently need to build this heritage for the future, much like the Svalbard Global Seed Vault kept on the island of Spitsbergen," explains Jerome Chappellaz, the French project initiator from CNRS.

"Our generation of scientists, which bears witness to global warming, has a particular responsibility to future generations. That is why we will be donating these ice samples from the world's most fragile glaciers to the scientific community of the decades and centuries to come, when these glaciers would have disappeared or lost their data quality," adds Carlo Barbante, the Italian project initiator from Ca' Foscari University of Venice.

Source | http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/science/Soon-worlds-first-library-of-ice-archives-to-come-up-in-Antarctica/articleshow/53323864.cms

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Pralhad Jadhav

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Khaitan & Co

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