A team of European scientists camped in the Arctic this week started drilling to extract samples of ancient ice before they’re melted away by climate change.
The French, Italian and Norwegian researchers travelled to the Holtedahlfonna icefield in Norway’s Svalbard Archipelago – a rugged, remote terrain of glaciers and frozen tundra that lies between mainland Norway and the North Pole.
Setting up camp at an altitude of 1,100 metres, the team is tasked with collecting two 125-metre ice cores to better understand “Arctic amplification” – the phenomenon by which the Arctic is warming as much as four times faster than the rest of the world in recent decades.
Ice steeped in history
The Ice Memory Foundation behind the operation says the team is in a race against time to preserve valuable ice records so they can be used by future generations of scientists to study historic environmental conditions.
This is because melted ice is leaking down and altering the geochemical records dating back three centuries.
While the South Pole lies on the continental land mass that is Antarctica, the North Pole sits squarely in the Arctic Ocean – a delicate landscape of snow and ice that has been undergoing massive changes in recent years.
Satellite images help to track the changes taking place in the Arctic, a vast and remote region where the extreme cold and long periods of darkness make conditions difficult on the ground.
Daunting task
Experts will work for three weeks in temperatures as low as minus 25 degrees Celsius to extract metre-long cylinders of the precious ice.
The Svalbard is the eigth drilling operation for the Ice Memory Foundation, which collects and preserve ice cores around the world, from the polar regions to the Alps and the Andes.
One sample from the Holtedahlfonna icefield will be stored for centuries in an ice memory sanctuary under the snow in the Antarctic, while the other will be subject to immediate study.
The Ice Memory Foundation was founded by the University Grenoble Alpes, the CNRS, the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development, the French Polar Institute, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, the CNR in Italy and Switzerland's Paul Scherrer Institute.
