The Europe-based Ice Memory Foundation has announced the inauguration of its mountain ice cores sanctuary, with the arrival of the first two cores at the facility, located at the Franco-Italian Concordia Research Station in Antarctica. Concordia is one of only three permanent research stations in the interior of the continent, being located on the Antarctic Plateau.

The Ice Memory Foundation was launched in 2015 by an alliance of French, Italian and Swiss institutions. The French agencies are the National Centre for Scientific Research, the National Research Institute for Sustainable Development, and the University of Grenoble Alpes. The Italian institutions are the National Research Council (CNR) and the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. The Swiss agency is the Paul Scherrer Institute. The initiative is also supported, with funding, by the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation.  

The reason for the creation of the mountain ice cores sanctuary is the accelerating melting of glaciers around the world. Over the past quarter century, glaciers in Europe have lost between 2% and 39% of their ice, with the average global figure being 5%. Glacier ice is an important scientific resource, as it contains a wide range of scientifically-useful matter and other information, stretching back centuries and even millennia. This provides key insights into past climatic conditions. The melting of glaciers is destroying this record of past and far past environmental conditions.

“By safeguarding physical samples of atmospheric gases, aerosols, pollutants and dust trapped in ice layers, the Ice Memory Foundation ensures that future generations of researchers will be able to study past climate conditions using technologies that may not yet exist,” explained Ice Memory Foundation co-chair and Ca’ Foscari University of Venice's Professor Carlo Barbante.

Both the first two ice cores at the sanctuary come from the Alps in Europe, being extracted from Mont Blanc in France in 2016 and from Grand Combin in Switzerland in 2025. It is expected that, in due course, they will be joined by cores from glaciers in the Andes, the Caucasus, Pamir Mountains, Svalbard, and elsewhere. An international governance framework will be established to oversee the sanctuary.

“For these cores to serve science in a century’s time, they must be managed as a global common,” highlighted Ice Memory Foundation chair and University of Bern's Professor Thomas Stocker. “The creation of such a governance model would be a major achievement of the [UN] Decade [2025-2034] of Action for the Cyrospheric Sciences.”     

The sanctuary is composed of an ice tunnel excavated in compact snow layers at a depth of 9 m. It wis 35 m long, 5 m wide and also 5 m high. Its temperature will remain close to -52 °C, all the year around. Because of the environmental conditions, no construction materials, or foundations, or refrigeration systems, are required in its creation or maintenance.