Ice cores hold global memories

The 130metre core (called a carotte in French) from the Col du Dôme glacier is like a diary of the world’s atmosphere since the birth of the glacier, as trapped air bubbles contain whatever was in the atmosphere at the time the ice was formed.

Measuring the methane and CO2 allows scientists to map climatic changes from centuries before the first recordings – and, possibly, calculate the rate of climate change and its effects.

Anne-Catherine Ohlmann, spokeswoman for the Sauvegarder la Mémoire de la Glace project, said: “It’s going really well and the first sections are safely stored in our freezer.” The ice core will be flown to the French-Italian Concordia research base in Antarctica, where it will be stored along with others from other glaciers around the world until there is funding to research and map the trapped gases.

With Alpine and other glaciers melting it is a race against time. Geophysicist Jérôme Chap­pellaz, leader of the Protecting Ice Memory project, says their aim is to save this information which has already shown that temperatures at the Col du Dôme rose by 1.5C between 1194 and 2005.