Overview
- The Ice Memory Foundation inaugurated the repository at Concordia Station on January 14, placing the first Alpine cores after a roughly 50‑day refrigerated journey from Trieste, Italy.
- Samples from Mont Blanc in France and Grand Combin in Switzerland are stored in a purpose-dug snow cave about 10 meters below the surface at a natural temperature near −52 °C.
- The archive is a 35‑meter-long cavern designed to preserve trapped air, aerosols, contaminants and other signals that future technologies can analyze.
- Initiated in 2015 by French, Italian and Swiss research institutions, the effort plans to add cores from regions including the Andes and Tajikistan and to seek an international convention to protect the collection.
- Organizers cite rapid glacier loss—reported regional declines of about 2% to 39% since 2000—as the rationale for safeguarding these irreplaceable records under the Antarctic Treaty framework.