European researchers began operating the first global repository of mountain ice cores in Antarctica on Wednesday, aiming to preserve irreplaceable climate records as global warming accelerates glacier melt.

The facility is located around the Concordia station in the Antarctic Plateau, where naturally stable temperatures of around minus 50 degrees Celsius allow ice cores to be stored beneath snow without artificial refrigeration.

The storage site is part of the Ice Memory Foundation initiative, led by research institutions from France, Italy and other countries, which seeks to collect and safeguard representative ice cores from key glaciers before they disappear.

The first batch of samples was collected from Alpine mountain, including Mont Blanc in France and Grand Combin in Switzerland, and transported under strict cold-chain conditions by icebreaker and aircraft over about 50 days to Antarctica..

Carlo Barbante, vice chair of the Ice Memory Foundation and a professor at Ca' Foscari University in Venice, told the Associated Press, "By safeguarding physical samples of atmospheric gases, aerosols, pollutants and dust trapped in ice layers, the Ice Memory Foundation ensures that future generations of researchers will be able to study past climate conditions using technologies that may not yet exist."

A study published in Nature Climate Change in December 2025 warned that without effective action on climate change, the number of glaciers disappearing worldwide could accelerate from about 1,000 per year today to between 2,000 and 4,000 annually by the 2040s or 2050s, risking the permanent loss of critical climate information.