In this story
Ines Castell
Ines writes about ice, heat and the people adapting to both. She files most stories from somewhere cold.
Each cylinder of ice is roughly a metre long and holds thousands of years of trapped air. Once a glacier melts, that record is gone for good.
That is why a team of glaciologists has spent the past five summers drilling cores from glaciers in the Alps, the Andes and Central Asia, then flying them to a storage vault kept at minus fifty degrees.
A library for future questions
The researchers are careful not to analyse everything now. The point of the archive is to preserve samples for techniques that have not been invented yet.
“We are collecting answers to questions no one has thought of.”
Racing the thermometer
Two of the glaciers sampled in the project’s first year have already lost more than a fifth of their volume. The team says the drilling window for many sites will close within this decade.
End of story — thanks for reading NEWSROOM 27.
