(July 14 2016) From Monday, August 15 to the beginning of September an international team of glaciologists and a dozen engineers – French, Italian, Russian and American – will climb the Col du Dome (4,300 meters on Mont Blanc) to pick up the first “heritage-cores ” with the aim to build the first world archive library of ice extracted from glaciers threatened by global warming. Among the project promoters Carlo Barbante, director of the Institute for the Dynamics of Environmental Processes of the National Research Council (CNR-IDPA) and professor at the University Ca’Foscari Venezia, and Patrick Ginot, engineer Ird Research (Institut de recherche pour le dévelopement) within LGGE of University of Grenoble Alpes and CNRS. Three ice cores of 130 meters each will be extracted and transported by helicopter down the mountain and shipped to Grenoble at the Laboratory of Glaciology and Geophysics Agency (LGGE) of University of Grenoble Alpes and the National Centre for Scientific Research, guaranteeing a rigorous cold chain. One of the three cores will be analyzed in 2019 to establish a database available to all the world’s scientific community. In 2020 the other two cores shall be transported by ship and tracked vehicle on the Antarctic highlands, a land of science and peace, where it will be stored securely for many centuries in the Concordia base, managed by the French Polar Institute “Paul Emile Victor” and the its Italian partner, the National program for Antarctic research (PNRA). In the end, this heritage of dozens of ice cores will be stored in a cave dug under the snow at -54 ° C, the safest – and natural – world’s freezer. (Red)
