Tajikistan donates ice cores to study climate history

Tajikistan became the first country to donate two ice cores to the international scientific community —one each to the Pamir Research programme and the Ice Memory sanctuary in Antarctica on Monday.

- Jayashree Nandi

The ice cores were collected from the Kon Chukurbashi area of Pamir, one of the regions covered by what the scientific community calls the “Karakoram Anomaly”.

Ice cores area vertical column ofice extracted from glaciers and ice-sheets; they hold records of what the planet was like hundreds of thousands of years ago. Older ice cores could be between 500,000 and 800,000 years old.

On September 24, an international team of scientists launched a new ice coring expedition on the Pamir Mountains, Tajikistan, at an altitude of 5,800 metres, on the Kon Chukurbashi ice cap. Thirteen scientists led by the Swiss-funded PAMIR Project and ateam of Tajik partners extracted the first-ever deep ice cores from the Pamirs from a depth of around 105 metres.