In a battle against time before it melts away owing to climate change, scientists have succeeded in saving samples of ancient Arctic ice for analysis, they reported this week.
Eight researchers from France, Italy, and Norway camped in the Svalbard archipelago of Norway in March and April, enduring storms and mishaps to preserve vital ice records that can be used to analyze the Earth’s climate in the past and map the catastrophic effects that human activity is having on it right now.
On Svalbard, the team from the Ice Memory Foundation removed three enormous glacier ice tubes. They will be stored for upcoming scientific investigation at a research station in Antarctica, along with other samples gathered by the 20-year project that was began in 2015.
Long after the original glacier has vanished, chemical analysis in such deep “ice cores” yields important information on centuries’ worth of prior climatic and environmental circumstances.
However, there is a competition to keep this “ice memory” alive. According to experts, meltwater is pouring into ancient ice as the world’s temperatures rise, endangering the geochemical records it carries before scientists can gather them.
The first issue was the weather when the Ice Memory crew set up camp in March on Holtedahlfonna, one of the tallest and most northerly glaciers in the Arctic.
Strong winds caused the temperature to drop to -40C instead of the anticipated -25C (-13C), which caused a multi-day delay in drilling. After that, water from the melting glacier surged into the 24.5-meter (80-foot) hole they had just drilled in the ice.
Although radar data gathered since 2005 indicated that the Holtedalhfonna glacier contained some meltwater, Jean-Charles Gallet, snow physicist at the Norwegian Polar Institute and expedition coordinator, said that “we did not expect to find such an extended, abundant and saturated aquifer in the selected drilling site, at the end of winter.”
