An international team that includes scientists from the University of Fribourg has succeeded in drilling and retrieving two ice cores measuring over 100 m from a glacier in Tajikistan. This genuine technical and logistical feat was also achieved at over 5800 m above sea level. Begun on 24 September of this year, the two-week-long expedition aims to preserve millenniums of climate history.

Outside of the Earth’s two polar regions, the Pamir Mountain range between Central and Southern Asia is home to the highest number of glaciers on the planet. Accumulated over the course of hundreds of years, their ice contains, layer upon layer, a long history of our planet’s climate and any changes it has gone through since they first formed. They represent an extraordinary achievement that scientists are seeking to preserve before global warming irreversibly turns them into running water. Currently, the Pamir glaciers are among the least documented on the planet.

A scientific undertaking at the very highest level
Until now attempts to extract ice cores there have been hampered by the difficulties of reaching the sites and logistical worries. Thanks to the PAMIR project, funded by the Swiss Polar Institute (SPI), the scientists finally managed to overcome those obstacles. Initially working with Tajik institutions like the Tajik Academy of Sciences, the researchers identified a promising site, the Kon Chukurbashi ice cap, located at 5800 m above sea level near the district of Murghob. The researches decided the location would be very good for collecting two core samples, those direct records of ancient weather conditions in ice, a priceless daybook of the past.

Two exceptionally long ice cores
Next, 13 scientists traveled to Tajikistan to make the undertaking a reality. Coordinated by the University of Fribourg and realized working with the Tajik Academy of Sciences and other Swiss, Austrian, Japanese and American universities, the expedition quickly achieved its objectives. Martin Hölzle, a professor at the Department of Geosciences of the University of Fribourg and the driving force behind the PAMIR project, was delighted with the results. “Our colleagues were able to extract two core samples, the first one measuring 104.7 m and the second 105 m. It’s all the more remarkable in that this is the first deep high-altitude record in Pamir at a time when such opportunities are becoming increasingly rare,” Professor Hölzle explained.

For future generations
The first core will be analyzed as part of the research being done by the PAMIR project. The second will be used in the Ice Memory project, which aims to enable future generations of scientists to continue to pursue research in this field despite the disappearance of glaciers. In order to guarantee that it will be optimally preserved, the second core sample will be stored in Antarctica at Concordia Station, the French-Italian research facility operating year-round there. These two core samples will yield valuable information that will help scientists to anticipate the future of the world’s climate and inform political decisions of future generations on a global scale.