Dushanbe, Tajikistan – While the world major ice fields in Greenland, the Alps, and the Himalayas are rapidly receding, a vast mountain region in Central Asia, including the Pamir mountains of Tajikistan, has seen its glaciers remain surprisingly stable, or even gain mass. A team of international scientists has undertaken a grueling expedition to drill for ancient ice cores, hoping to understand this “Karakoram anomaly” and determine whether its resilience can last.
Led by glaciologist Evan Miles, affiliated with the Universities of Fribourg and Zurich, a dozen scientists from Switzerland, Japan, the United States, and Tajikistan, accompanied exclusively by an Agence France-Presse (AFP) photographer, trekked to the remote Kon-Chukurbashi ice cap near the Chinese border.
After four days crossing the country, the team climbed on foot to over 5,800 meters (over 19,000 feet) altitude. They spent a week camping at the summit in freezing temperatures, battling a daylong blizzard, to successfully drill and extract two 105-meter-long ice cores.
Archive of Climate Indicators
These ancient ice layers, compacted over centuries or even millennia, form an invaluable archive of past climate indicators, containing data on snowfall, temperatures, atmospheric composition, and dust.
“We’re hopeful for a truly unique core, not just for the region, but for the broader region actually, probably extending back 20 to 25 or 30,000 years,” Miles said.
The apparently resistant glaciers are spread across high mountain ranges including the Karakoram, Tian Shan, Kun Lun, and the Pamir mountains. By analyzing the deep ice, researchers aim to discover the factors that have allowed these glaciers to resist the general planetary warming of recent decades.
“This whole region is globally unique because over the last 25 years, these glaciers have shown very, very limited mass loss and even mass gain,” Miles explained.
While some limited signs of loss have appeared recently, the scientists seek to determine whether this is a natural variation or the definite onset of decline. “In order to understand that, we really, really need to have a longer time period of records of both temperature and precipitation at the glacier sites,” which the ice cores will provide, Miles added.
Preserving Climate History
The extracted cores must now be analyzed in a laboratory to determine their dates. One core will be sent to Japan for in-depth analysis. The second core is destined for storage in an underground sanctuary in Antarctica at minus 50 degrees Celsius, a project run by the Ice Memory Foundation, which supported the expedition along with the main funder, the Swiss Polar Institute.
The Ice Memory Foundation aims to preserve ice samples from glaciers threatened by global warming for future generations of scientists.
“We will probably lose 90% of our glacier mass on the Earth,” said Thomas Stocker, Ice Memory’s president. The foundation is “trying to help preserve a thing that is threatened by human action” so that future scientists can analyze them with more advanced tools in 50, 100, or 200 years.
The scientific team was scheduled to hold a news conference in the Tajik capital Dushanbe on Monday to review their successful mission.