a scientific expedition wants to go back in time and trace the climate of the past

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A team of scientists has just settled in northern Norway to recover and preserve precious ice cores. Their study will make it possible to trace the climate of the past: temperature, precipitation and composition of the atmosphere.

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A tourist camp in Svalbard (Norway), in March 2015. (ARILD LYSSAND / SVALBARD POLICE)

These French, Italian and Norwegian researchers set up camp this weekend on the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, with temperatures ranging between -5 and -25 degrees. For two weeks, their mission will consist of taking two ice cores, each 125 meters long (and 10 cm in diameter). It’s longer than the length of a football field, which gives you an idea of ​​how deep you’ll need to drill.

Why collect two ice cores there? Because the glaciers of Svalbard are among the northernmost glaciers in Europe. They have been studied for more than 20 years and contain a lot of information about the region’s past. By analyzing their chemical composition, and the air bubbles trapped in the ice, it is, in fact, possible to go back in time and trace the climate of the past: temperature, precipitation and composition of the atmosphere. One of the cores will make it possible to trace the climatic history of the Arctic over the last 300 years.

New expeditions to Tajikistan and the Himalayas

And there is an urgent need to save these precious frozen archives, because they are melting. The Arctic is one of the fastest warming regions in the world. It has already warmed by 4 to 5 degrees in the space of 50 years. The second ice core will be transported to Antarctica by boat over the next year to be kept there for the next few centuries in a specific sanctuary called “Ice Memory”. This sanctuary, under construction within the Franco-Italian Concordia station, allows natural storage at -50 degrees all year round. It will soon accommodate samples of different glaciers threatened with extinction in the world.

These ice samples will become a common good of humanity and will be used by future generations of researchers. The “Ice Memory” team has already taken samples of glaciers in the Alps, the Andes, the Caucasus… And soon plans to do so in Tajikistan and the Himalayas.


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