How the Antarctic Ice Vault Stores Clues to the Earth's Past

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Transcript

00:00What if critical climate data disappears before we can use it?

00:04For thousands of years, glaciers have stored a record of the Earth's climate and atmospheric history,

00:10trapped deep inside the ice.

00:12But global warming is destroying that archive as glaciers melt.

00:15In an effort to preserve that record, scientists have extracted ice cores over the past decade,

00:21from the Alps to the Andes.

00:22Many of those cores are now going into storage in a vast frozen chamber

00:26newly built in the depths of Antarctica.

00:30French and Italian scientists working on the ice memory project

00:33say the samples will be preserved for centuries to come,

00:37in one of the coldest and remotest spots on the planet.

00:41The course will help scientists understand how past ecosystems responded to climate stress

00:46and help them build better climate models and strategies for the future.

00:51The long-term governance of the vault and the trove of information stored inside it

00:55is yet to be decided.

00:56But in a world where climate scientists increasingly contested,

01:00the project founders say that the cave and its content

01:03should be an eternal sanctuary protected by international law.