Between September 24 and October 13, 2025, an international team of scientists carried out an ice coring expedition on the Pamir Mountains of Central Asia, in Tajikistan, part of the often called “Roof of the World”. At an altitude of 5.800m, on the Kon Chukurbashi ice cap, a team of 15 scientists succeeded in extracting the first two ever deep ice cores from the Pamir. One of the two will be added to the heritage of the Ice Memory Foundation, a foundation under the auspices of the UGA Foundation. The Ice Memory initiative aims to preserve the climatic and environmental memory of glaciers around the world in a sanctuary in Antarctica. This 10th expedition was funded by the Swiss Polar Institute and brought together partners from Tajikistan, Switzerland, Japan, the United States, and Russia.
Sampling the entire depth from the surface to the bedrock - +/- 105 m - is crucial as this region hosts some of the highest and oldest glaciers in the Northern Hemisphere. These silent giants located nearby the famous Fedchenko, have been storing, layer upon layer of snow, a unique climate archive from one of the world’s most vulnerable and data-scarce regions.
During this 3-week Ice Coring Expedition led by the University of Fribourg, two deep ice cores, 104.7 and 105 meters long, were extracted at an altitude of 5.814 meters.
Located in one of the most remote and extreme environments on Earth, the Kon Chukurbashi ice cap is expected to hold at least 700 years of climate history and regional climate variations. Although the glaciers of the Pamirs have been resilient to anthropogenic climate change until now, the vital climate signals preserved within them are already at risk following a decade of hot and dry years - possibly a turning point for the region. These two first deep ice cores will offer major climate archives from this region which hosts some of the oldest glaciers in the Northern Hemisphere.
Back from the field in Dushanbe and during a highly symbolic ceremony on the 13rd October, in favor of the ice memory of the Pamir Mountains, one ice core has been given by Tajikistan to the PAMIR Consortium for collaborative analysis, and will be carried out in Japan in collaboration with Nagoya University and Hokkaido University. the second ice core has officially been given to the Ice Memory Foundation to safeguard it in a dedicated sanctuary in Antarctica, constituting a lasting legacy for centuries to come.
With this ice core, future generations of scientists will be able to access the climatic and environmental memory of the Pamirs, even if the extraordinary physical archive of glacier ice, full of incredible details about the evolution of the Central Asian climate, has disappeared due to climate change.
The Ice Memory Sanctuary will be located in Antarctica, at the French-Italian Concordia station, jointly managed by PNRA (National Antarctic Research Program, Italy) and IPEV (French Polar Institute). The Ice Memory sanctuary sheltering these precious archives is a major milestone for the founders of the Ice Memory Foundation: CNRS, IRD, Université Grenoble Alpes, Ca'Foscari University of Venice, CNR and PSI.
This expedition will provide a crucial contribution to the United Nations Decade of Action for Cryospheric Sciences.
The Ice Memory Foundation
Created in 2014 following a visit by Prince Albert of Monaco to Laboratoire de glaciologie et de géophysique de l'environnement, now the Institut des géosciences de l'environnement (IGE - CNRS/INRAE/IRD/UGA – Grenoble INP-UGA), the Ice Memory project was launched by researchers Jérôme Chappellaz and Patrick Ginot with the support of the newly created UGA Foundation, of which UGA is a founding member.
The goal: to preserve ice cores from all around the world for scientists in centuries to come. In 2016, Ice Memory carried out its first Franco-Italian drilling operation at the Col du Dôme glacier, below the summit of Mont Blanc. Expeditions followed to Bolivia in 2017, Russia in 2018, and Switzerland in 2020.
In 2021, seven French, Swiss, and Italian scientific institutions created the Ice Memory Foundation, with Prince Albert of Monaco as its honorary president. The Foundation aims to preserve the memory of glaciers in a sanctuary in Antarctica for future generations. Since then, new expeditions have been carried out in Italy in 2021 and 2023, Tanzania in 2022, Norway in 2023, and this new and 10th expedition to Tajikistan in 2025.
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