Scientists race to recover vital natural archive from rapidly melting glaciers

There's been little good news for glaciers so far in 2025. A series of reports all reach the same conclusion: climate change is melting these bodies of ice at alarming rates.

This has not been a good year for glaciers. A series of reports all appear to confirm that climate change is melting these bodies of ice at an alarming rate. Since 2000, the world has lost more than 7 trillion tons of ice from mountain glaciers.

Signs of melting are evident on the Italian side of the Mont Blanc massif:

“What we have observed over the years is that the glacier is slowing down and this is a sign that there is less input of mass to the glacier from snowfall,” says Davide Fugazza, researcher at the Department of Environmental Science and Policy University of Milan.

Race against time

Now scientists are rushing to recover the records stored within a glacier in Tajikistan, where the ice has created a natural archive full of important information about rainfall, volcanic eruptions and other climate events.

Perched at 5,800 meters in the Pamir Mountains, an international team of scientists is undertaking a critical mission to secure the first deep ice cores ever extracted from this region.

The expedition, led by the Swiss-funded PAMIR Project in collaboration with Tajik and other international partners, is drilling more than 100 meters into the Kon Chukurbashi ice cap.

American scientist Evan Miles, from Portland, Oregon, has been leading the expedition in Tajikistan for the last four years, often working in conditions of minus 25 degrees Celsius with the wind chill.

The ice brought back to the surface from deep below is like a time capsule filled with important climate data for scientists to study. The objective is to rescue a unique climate archive preserved for millennia within the ice.

The cores of ice, much like the rings of trees or coral beneath the oceans, can tell scientists important information, for example, how much it rained in any particular year. They provide an accurate record of Earth’s conditions at the time, and known volcanic eruptions, the Industrial Revolution, and even more recent nuclear tests can all be detected. So ice cores are vital time capsules for scientists studying climate in the region over many thousands of years.

Risk of contamination

This particular glacier has serious consequences for water resources in the Indian subcontinent and may even impact monsoon rainfall patterns.

However, this natural archive is at imminent risk of being lost forever due to melting driven by global warming. As the climate warms, particularly at high altitudes, the most recent ice, over the last couple hundred years, can be contaminated by melting water, and the data is lost.

Prof. Thomas F. Stocker is chair of the Ice Memory Foundation at the University of Bern:

"What can happen, as the warming progresses, you will have very hot summers, even up there. Very hot meaning above the melting point of ice, which means that water can percolate into the firn - that's the compacted snow that, is on top of the of the firm ice - and therefore contaminate the climate signals.”

It’s a critical mission to secure the first deep ice cores ever extracted from this region. Success would provide scientists with a crucial long-term record from one of the world’s most data-scarce regions.