The ICE MEMORY program
Mountain glaciers have dramatically retreated and thinned in recent times and are in danger of disappearing rapidly in the coming decades as global temperatures rise. This is a major challenge the scientific community is facing, since glacial-archived information forming one of the best libraries of past climatic and environmental changes is under threat of being lost forever. As an international initiative, ICE MEMORY aims at collecting heritage ice cores from the world’s key endangered glaciers to store them under safe conditions and international governance in Antarctica for future generations of scientists. As a first major step, the international Ice Memory Foundation was created at the beginning of this year, with Paul Scherrer Institute being one of the seven founding members.