World’s glacier ice gets a new safehouse, far from climate change — and Trump

The world’s ice is disappearing — and with it, our planet’s memory of itself. 

At a very southern ribbon-cutting ceremony on the Antarctic snowpack Wednesday, scientists stored long cores of ice taken from two dying Alpine glaciers inside a 30-meter tunnel — safe, for now, from both climate change and global geopolitical upheaval.

Each ice sample contains tiny microbes and bubbles of air trapped in the ancient past. Future scientists, using techniques unknown today, might use the ice cores to unlock new information about virus evolution, or global weather patterns. 

Extracting ice from glaciers around the world and carrying it to Antarctica involved complex scientific and diplomatic collaboration — exactly the type of work denigrated by the Trump Administration of the United States, said Olivier Poivre d’Arvor, a special envoy of France’s President Emmanuel Macron and ambassador to the Poles.

Scientists are “threatened by those who doubt science and want to muzzle it. Climate change is not an hoax, as President Trump and others say. Not at all,” Poivre d’Arvor said during an online press conference Wednesday.

Glaciers are retreating worldwide thanks to global warming. In some regions their information about the past will be lost forever in the coming decades, no matter what is done to curb the Earth’s temperature.

“Our time machines are melting very quickly,” said Carlo Barbante, an Italian scientist who is the vice chair of the Ice Memory Foundation (IMF).

The tunnel, known as the Ice Memory Sanctuary, is just under a kilometer from the French-Italian Concordia base in Antarctica. It rests on an ice sheet 3,200 meters thick and is a constant minus 52 degrees. Scientists said they believed the tunnel would stay structurally stable for more than 70 years before needing to be remade.

As well as the two ice samples, which arrived by ship and plane this month, the scientists have collected cores from eight other glaciers from Svalbard to Kilimanjaro. These are currently in freezers awaiting transportation to Antarctica. Co-founder of the sanctuary Jérôme Chappellaz, a French sociologist, called for more such facilities to be opened across Antarctica, and said he expected China would soon create its own store for Tibetan ice.

Poivre d’Arvor called for an international treaty that commits countries to donate ice to the Sanctuary and guarantee access for scientists.

France and Italy have collaborated on building the sanctuary and provided resources to assist with the transportation of the samples. “This is not a short-term investment but a strategic choice grounded in scientific responsibility and international cooperation,” Gianluigi Consoli, an official from the Italian Ministry of Universities and Research.

On the inside of the door that locks the ice away, someone had written in black marker “Quo Vadis?” Latin for “where are you going?” It’s a question that hangs over even the protected southern continent. Antarctica is governed by a 1959 treaty that suspended territorial claims and preserved the continent for the purposes of science and peace.

With President Donald Trump’s grab for territory near the North Pole in Greenland, the internationalist ideals that have brought stability to the Antarctic for over half a century appear to no be longer shared by the U.S.

But William Muntean, who was senior advisor for Antarctica at the State Department during Trump’s first term Trump and under President Joe Biden, said there had been “no sign” U.S. policy in Antarctica would change, nor did he expect it to.

“The southern polar region is very different from the western hemisphere and from the Arctic,” Muntean said. The U.S. doesn’t claim sovereignty, military competition is negligible, nor are there commercially viable energy or mining projects at the South Pole. “Taking disruptive or significant actions in Antarctica would not advance any Trump administration priorities.”

That said, he added, “you can never rule out a change.”