Name: Freezing the past to protect the future
Uploaded: 2026-01-18T17:14:05.638Z
Duration: 2 min 1 s
Description: Glaciers across the world contain historical information, from temperatures and atmospheric composition to pollution across millennia. But as global temperatures rise, these frozen secrets are in danger of disappearing.

Glaciers across the world contain historical information, from temperatures and atmospheric composition to pollution across millennia. But as global temperatures rise, these frozen secrets are in danger of disappearing.

Ancient ice cores extracted from Switzerland and France have been transported to the East Antarctic Plateau, where they are stored in a natural ice vault at minus 50 degrees Celsius. This initiative, led by the Ice Memory Foundation, aims to preserve irreplaceable climate records as global warming accelerates the loss of mountain glaciers.

The ice cores contain valuable data on past temperatures, atmospheric composition, and human pollution, providing reference points for future scientific research. The project highlights international cooperation in response to recent findings that global temperatures have exceeded the critical 1.5°C threshold over the past three years.

Freezing the past to protect the future

Ancient ice from the Alps, drilled out from Switzerland and France, has traveled a long way to Antarctica to be stored in the coldest place on Earth, the East Antarctic Plateau. This snow cave is an ice vault with a constant temperature of around minus 50 degrees Celsius. Samples can be preserved naturally, without energy or refrigeration, safe from power failures and conflict, long after global warming melts glaciers around the world. Every year, unfortunately, 273 billion tons of ice are lost, an amount equal to 30 years of global human water consumption. This is the kind of crisis we are facing. These ice cores are not relics then. They are reference points. Within their layers are preserved records of temperature, atmospheric composition, volcanic events, and traces of human pollution. They allow scientists now and in the future to understand what changed, how fast, and why. This is not nostalgia. This is preparation. The Ice Memory Foundation is the first of its kind. Its inauguration comes as EU researchers release data showing average temperatures exceeded the critical 1.5 Celsius threshold of global warming over the last three years. Scientific diplomacy can serve as a shining example of how nations can work together for the common good of humanity. I think that today, we freeze the past to protect the future. In a warming world, mountain glaciers are disappearing at an unprecedented speed. This Sanctuary for Ice is preserving irreplaceable scientific information from the past centuries, hoping it can one day be extracted by future generation of scientists.

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