The snowpack in Bolivia is preserved in Antarctica for research

A group of scientists led by the French Institute for Development Research (IRD) is planning to transport part of the Illimani snowpack, in the Andes Mountains, in Bolivia, to Antarctica in advance. The risk of this ice being melted by climate change.

According to IRD director Patrick Ginot, the aim of this project is to preserve "memories" , in other words, scientific information that can be extracted from ice masses accumulated from snow layers for thousands of years.

It is expected that a group of six scientists will drill to the bottom of Illimani to take out three cylindrical samples of ice and then transport in the cold tunnel of the Grenoble research vessel of the Ice Memory project (Memories of the ice) to the South. pole.

Mount Illimani.

Located 80 km from the capital of La Paz and an absolute height of 6.462m, Illimani is the second highest mountain in Bolivia and scientists believe that studying the different ice layers of the whole ice sheet will help them re-manifest. This city's pollutant emissions have been around for hundreds of years and capture many other information.

According to calculations by scientists, all the ice blocks on the Andes mountain peaks below 5,500 meters altitude will disappear completely within the next 20 years due to the effects of climate change.

According to Ginot, due to the lack of snow and ice reserves , the amount of water in the Andes natural reservoirs will decrease by up to 36% in the dry season, however the assembly of ice blocks and storage of them artificially. may help alleviate this situation.

Ginot added that in addition to Illimani, until now, scientists from the Ice Memory project have successfully exploited the specimen from another mountain peak in the Andes territory of Bolivia, Huayana Potosí and over. It was discovered that by the end of this century, the amount of ice at the top of the mountain would be only half that of the present.