anlomedadhttps://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/27/antarctic-ice-sanctuary-cave-melting-glacier-samples
Interesting endeavour! As mountain glaciers melt, their trapped gas and also pollen records first blur by meltwater intrusions – and then vanish completely in the melt process.
French and Italian research institutes and the Albert of Monaco Foundation banded up to collect and preserve 20 ice core samples from mountains around the world. Storage site: a 10m deep dug-out ice cave near their 🇫🇷 🇮🇹 Concordia Station in #Antarctica
The core archive will be open-access to every researcher globally, provided they get to the location.
At -52°C inside the cave, melting of the cores is prevented. But natural ice flow processes – Antarctica isn't a static clump of ice – will require someone to dig a new cave every 60 to 70 years and move the cores. (Or invent a storage site that can withstand the glacier flow?)
I searched for that bit of information specifically and found it at min. 37 in the inauguration video https://www.ice-memory.org/ice-memory-foundation-/press-release-inauguration-of-the-ice-memory-sanctuary-in-antarctica-1698645.kjsp?RH=1832088615308700
Another example of how Antarctica isn't a static clump of ice: to counter the ice flow movement, the actual pole at the South Pole gets dug out New Year,'s and stuck back into the ice 10m back: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-south-pole-just-moved-heres-why/
