Ice Memory Italian drilling: a research project to collect heritage ice cores from Alps, Apennines and Arctic region

The last IPCC special report on the cryosphere states that the glaciers will lose substantial mass by the end of the century, all over the word. Glaciers decline is going to cause the loss of climatic information stored in the ice layers. It is therefore strongly urgent to take action to preserve this information. Ice Memory (IM) is an international research project that aims to drill ice cores from mountain glaciers from all over the world, to characterize their climatic and environmental records and store them in the coldest place in the world: Antarctica. The Italian team of Ice Memory is working to collect six ice cores from ice bodies with different characteristics: a) two glaciers located over 4000 m asl on Grand Combin (GC) and on Mt. Rosa (RS) (Pennines Alps); b) the Marmolada Glacier (MR), which is the largest glacier of the Dolomites, located below 3000 m slm; c) the Montasio Glacier (MS), which is the lowest glacier of the Italian Alps, located at around 1900 m slm on the Giulian Alps; d) the Calderone glacieret (CL), which is the southernmost European ice body, located in the middle of Appennines at around 2700 m asl; and e) Holthedlafonna glacier (HO) which is a large glacier in the north part of Svalbard Islands at 1100 m. HO glacier area is equal to 600 km2, MR, MS, and CL are characterized by glacier area lower than 1.5 km2, whereas MS and CL are smaller than 0.05 km2. To date, three of the six missions have been accomplished on GC, RS and CL. The drilling survey on HO, MR and MS are scheduled for 2023 and 2024. Although the presence of cold firn is an essential characteristic to preserve climate information, could low altitude and smaller ice bodies give us useful information about past climate? The challenge is to collect these samples before their complete disappearance, projected in the next few decades. For these reasons, IM represents the last chance to secure the information stored in these ice bodies.