Press release - October 2025
Launched at the end of September, following four years of cooperation between scientific organizations from Tajikistan and Switzerland, an international team from the PAMIR Project also including scientists from Japan and the United States, has successfully achieved its ambitious goal. During a 3-week Ice Coring Expedition led by the University of Fribourg, they drilled and secured two deep ice cores, 104.7 and 105 meters long, 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 ; 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.
Two deep ice cores of 105 m length to reveal the secrets of
resistant glaciers in the Pamir Mountains, Tajikistan - Central
Asia.
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