Establishing a bank of

A group of international academic banks are taking samples of "legacy tapes" at Mont Blanc (the highest mountain in Western Europe), to establish a world-class ice storage bank in Antarctica, serving for future scientific research programs.

Tape drilling for sampling has started from August 15 and will end in early September.

Scientists will extract an ice block of 130m length in the massif named Col de Dome , at an altitude of 4,300m. The ice sample will be sent to Antarctica to store at a negative temperature of 54 degrees Celsius, under conditions that avoid the effects of global warming.

Since the 2000s, scientists have had the idea of ​​establishing a bank to store "materials" for future research programs.

Antarctic ice.(Photo: NASA).

Global warming has a great impact on glaciers, which contain climate and environmental databases. So we must keep the tape samples for the future in time, explained Mr. Jerome Chappellaz, Director of Research at the Laboratory of Ice and Environmental Geophysics at the University of Grenoble Alpes (France). .

"No one can predict what scientists in the coming centuries will do with the ice blocks that we started storing from today, but we can know that soon the raw materials will be gone soon. This data will become scarce , " said Jerome Chappellaz.

Each layer of snow and ice provides information about climate progress, air composition, as well as information about viruses or bacteria. "In the future, we can study the evolution of the entire chromosome of a virus, or consider the ideas that science has not yet considered."

The next ice sample is scheduled to take place in Bolivia, at one of the nation's highest peaks, Illimani, at 6,300 meters, which will give information related to "cold periods." The most recent " price that Earth knew, 20,000 years ago.

In addition, scientists plan to collect ice samples in Switzerland. The authors of the project said they would take the most representative ice samples across the Earth.

At the scientific level, 24 countries participated in the ice sampling project, and the management of the Antarctic ice storage facility is still in the setting stage, possibly under sponsorship. by UNESCO or the United Nations Environment Program.