The second expedition of the ICE MEMORY project, which took place on the Illimani glacier (Bolivia) from 22 May to 18 June 2017, has been successfully completed. The international team successfully extracted two ice cores down to the bedrock, at an altitude of over 6300 m, despite extreme climate conditions. One of these cores will be analysed, and the other will become part of the first global core library containing glacier archives, from glaciers threatened by global warming, in Antarctica.
Having set out from La Paz on 22 May and spent several days acclimatising to the altitude, the international team (from France, Bolivia, Russia and Brazil) of 15 researchers and around 30 Bolivian guides and carriers, were faced with extreme climate conditions from their arrival at base camp, situated at an altitude of 4500 m. Heavy snowfall and strong winds delayed the transportation of equipment (corer, 75 isothermal boxes, camping equipment, etc.), to the summit by around a week.
During a brief calming of the meteorological conditions, the team then went to the summit to begin drilling on the glacier. In around ten days, two ice cores were extracted down to the bedrock: the first was 137 m long, and the second 134 m long. Initially, a third core was meant to be extracted, but this could not be attempted, because there was not enough time to guarantee the safety of the teams.
“This second expedition is a great collective success,” emphasises Patrick Ginot (IRD), coordinator of the ICE MEMORY expeditions. “The analyses of these cores, which will mainly be conducted by the Institute of Environmental Geosciences (IGE) in Grenoble, will allow us to retrace up to 18,000 years of climate and environmental archives.”
These cores will join those extracted in 2016 during the expedition on the Mont Blanc massif, and will contribute to the world’s first core library containing glacier archives, which will be created at the Concordia station in Antarctica, for researchers in centuries to come.
“ICE MEMORY is a formidable story of collaboration and trust between nations, scientists and private sponsors, who are taking responsibility in the face of climate change” praises Anne-Catherine Ohlmann, CEO of the UGA Foundation, which coordinates the sponsorship element of the project. “We hope that ICE MEMORY will help to raise awareness about the climate issues of our century, and that it will encourage decision-makers and citizens of the world to commit to protecting our environment and making the necessary societal changes.”
“We are counting on a strong knock-on effect of the two drilling operations by our team during this initiatory phase of the ICE MEMORY project,” emphasises Jérôme Chappellaz (CNRS), scientific coordinator of the project. “The Bolivian expedition, which has a strong international component, will help our partners to set up their own contributions to this global core library. Now we need to move forwards on the long-term governance of this unique heritage, by involving both UNESCO and logistical operators in the Antarctic.”
Patrick Ginot (expedition leader, IRD, France), Romain Biron (IRD, France), Pierre Vincent (IRD, France), Thomas Condom (IRD, France), Bruno Jourdain (UGA, France), Christian Vincent (CNRS, France), Nicolas Caillon (CNRS, France), Luc Piard (CNRS, France), Xavier Faïn (CNRS, France), Joël Savarino (CNRS, France), Vladimir Mikhalenko (Institute of Geography, Russia), Stanislav Kutuzov (Institut of Geography, Russia), Filipe Gaudie Ley Lindau (Federal University of Rio Grande Do Sul, Brazil), Alvaro Soruco (Higher University of San Andrés in La Paz, Bolivia), Sarah Del Ben (Wildtouch director).
For decades, glaciologists have been observing the impact of increasing temperatures on the melting of glaciers, which preserve the memory of past climates and environments and allow us to anticipate environmental changes to come. In the face of this alarming observation, French glaciologists from the environmental geosciences Institute (IGE Grenoble) and their Italian partners launched the ICE MEMORY project in 2015, under the aegis of the Fondation Université Grenoble Alpes, and with patronage from the French and Italian UNESCO national commissions.
Their main aim is to create, in the Antarctic, the world’s first library of glacial archives extracted from glaciers threatened by global warming. Samples will be the property of humanity and there will be ongoing governance to ensure their exceptional and appropriate usage, in order to allow scientists of future generations to conduct entirely original analyses, made possible by the evolution of technologies and scientific ideas.
The inaugural conference of the ICE MEMORY project, held in Paris in March 2017 under the patronage of UNESCO, marked the internationalisation of the programme, with the participation of around 15 American, Russian, Chinese, Brazilian, Swedish, Japanese, German, Swiss, Italian and French scientists specialising in the study of ice cores. The consortium wants to federate the international community of glaciologists, to conduct at least 20 drilling operations on different glaciers around the planet in the coming decade.
Under the Fondation Université Grenoble Alpes, ICE MEMORY already federates numerous institutional partners: the CNRS, IRD, the Université Grenoble Alpes, the Italian National Research Council and the University of Venice, as well as the IPEV, and the Italian Research Programme in Antarctica (PNRA) for the Concordia station in Antarctica. It is funded in equal parts by the founding members (providing human resources and equipment) and by private sponsorship, via the UGA Foundation.