'Ice vault' idea to keep climate's time capsule intact

Yahoo – AFP, Catherine Hours, 26 march 2015

File photo of a researcher analysing samples at the Laboratory for Glaciology

 and the Geophysics of the Environment, in Grenoble, southeastern France,

 in 2008 (AFP Photo/Jean-Pierre Clatot)

Imagine you are Sherlock Holmes bent on solving a mystery but the evidence is starting to crumble and eventually you will be left with worthless dust.

This is the worry which haunts ice scientists delving into Earth's threatened glaciers.

Deep inside them, the slumbering ice slabs hold information about Earth's climate past, and pointers for the future.

The frozen archive is formed from compacted layers snow which fell hundreds, thousands or even hundreds of thousands of years ago.

Jerome Chappellaz, senior scientist at the

 National Center for Scientific Research,

working at the Laboratory for Glaciology
and the Geophysics of the Environment in 

Grenoble, southeastern France, examines

 an ice sample (AFP Photo/Jean-Pierre 
Clatot)

Learning more about the past through examining the glaciers could help us predict how our planet will respond when global warming kicks into higher gear -- just decades from now, if predictions are right.

Only a tiny amount of this glacial material has ever been extracted and examined.

And as temperatures rise, the fringes of many glaciers are softening to mush, threatening the survival of this precious testament.

"We are the only scientific community working on climate history whose research material is disappearing," lamented Jerome Chappellaz at the Laboratory for Glaciology and the Geophysics of the Environment in Grenoble, southeastern France.

"It is time to do something -- we have to act now, while the glaciers are still a useable source."

That "something" is a new scheme to build a vault for ice cores extracted by scientists from the deep chill of Antarctica.

About 50-130 millimetres (two to five inches) wide, in sections between one to six metres (a yard to 20 feet) long, ice cores are glaciology's mainstay.

Within them are telltale bubbles of gas, notably the greenhouse-gas carbon dioxide (CO2).

By studying them, "past eras can be reconstructed, showing how and why climate changed, and how it might change in the future," says the US National Snow and Ice Data Center.

The deepest-ever core, drilled in Antarctica, is 3,270 metres long, and revealed the world has gone through eight ice ages over about 800,000 years.

These cycles, which profoundly affect life on our planet, generally move in lockstep with greenhouse gases.

Until the start of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-18th century, these heat-trapping gases had natural causes.

Today, the relentless burning of coal, gas and oil has taken carbon out of the ground and placed it in the atmosphere -- concentrations are now higher than at any time in the ice-core record.

'World's best refrigerator'

On present trends, Earth could face average warming of up to 4.8 degrees Celsius (8.6 degrees Fahrenheit) or more this century, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has warned.

But in some "hotspots," warming is happening faster than the global average, and for glaciers at lower altitudes and latitudes, time is running out.

"Antarctica is the best refrigerator in the world," Chappellaz told AFP.

In the envisioned vault, "the cores will be safe, even if a world war breaks out. There's no need for electricity. It will always be extremely cold. Even if there is 10 degrees (Celsius, 18 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming on the Antarctic plateaux, it will still be minus 43 C there, and the cores will be OK."

The vault would be at the French-Italian research base of Concordia, according to the scheme, which has the support of four other French institutes.

They are casting around for funding and sponsorships.

The UN's Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) is considering joining the initiative.

"We support the idea although at this stage, we haven't really figured out how we can provide it," said Anil Mishra of Unesco's International Hydrological Programme.

Learning more about the past through examining glaciers could help us predict 

how our planet will respond when global warming kicks into higher gear, scientists

 say (AFP Photo)

Mountain glacier cores, as opposed to ice sheet cores, are generally 100 to 150 metres deep.

They provide more recent snapshots of climate but invaluable local insights.

They can shed light on how different mountain regions respond to sharp swings in temperature, weather patterns and atmospheric pollutants such as soot -- a useful tip in tackling flood risk and securing water supplies.

The first contributions to the vault will come next year, from the Col du Dome, a site 4,300 metres high on Mont-Blanc, Europe's highest peak, and more will come in 2017 from the Illimani glacier, 6,300 metres above the Bolivian capital of La Paz.

The scheme's organisers are hoping that American, Chinese, Italian, Swiss and South American researchers will also contribute cores.

Future generations may learn even more from the capsules than current science allows, said Chappellaz.

"A few centuries from now, who knows what kind of technology may be available for analysing the cores?" he asked.

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THE RELATIONSHIP TO GAIA - April 2010 (Kryon channelled by Lee Carroll)

New Mini Ice Age

"The weather you have today, and all the alarming attributes of it, is a scenario of what was scheduled to happen on Earth anyway. I review again that the weather changes you are seeing prophesied by myself, 21 years ago, are not a surprise. The changes are not caused by the pollutants you put in the air. You call it global warming and that's a nice phrase, and perhaps that will get you to put less pollutants in the air – a very good thing. But what you are seeing in the weather shift today was not caused by Humans putting things into the air. It would have happened anyway in about 300 years."

"We've called this process the water cycle, since it's all about water, not about air. The water is the predominant attribute of Gaia and of the weather cycle you're seeing. More predominant is the temperature of it. The cycle is ice to water and water to ice, and has been repeated on this planet over and over and over. It is not new. It is not exceptional. It is not frightening. But it's a cycle that modern humanity has not seen before, and it's a long cycle that is beyond the life span of a Human Being. Therefore, it tends to be overlooked or not seen at all !"

"In the days of the Lemurians, the water level of the Pacific Ocean was almost 400 feet lower, and that's only 50,000 years ago. [Kryon invites science to check this out – the water level at that time.] That was a water cycle working, and the reason it was lower was due to so much of the water being stored as ice. Today you're going through another water cycle that will eventually lead to cooling. The last one was in the 1400s."

"Science sees that at about 1650. As mentioned, they are so slow there is no remembrance that a Human has of them except in past writings and in the rings of the trees. The time span of the changes is so great that environmental record keeping does not exist in the form that it does today. But you can still look at the rings of the trees and at the striations of the rocks and can generally figure out that a few hundred years ago, you had a mini-ice age. Now you're going to have another one."