Scientists Probe Tajik Glacier for Clues to Climate Resistance

AFP/APP

Kon Chukurbashi: Greenland is melting, the Alps are melting, and the Himalayas are melting — yet in one vast mountain region, huge glaciers have remained stable, or even gained mass, in recent decades.

The key question now is: can it last?

To find out, a team of a dozen scientists — accompanied exclusively by an AFP photographer — trekked high into the eastern mountains of Tajikistan to drill for ancient ice cores that could hold vital clues about climate change.

In September and October, the researchers spent four days crossing the country from west to east in four-wheel drives, before climbing on foot to over 5,800 metres on the Kon-Chukurbashi ice cap near the Chinese border.

Camping for a week at the summit in freezing temperatures and enduring a day-long blizzard, the scientists from Switzerland, Japan, the United States, and Tajikistan drilled two 105-metre-long ice cores in sections.

These compacted layers of ice, built up over centuries or even millennia, serve as an archive of climate indicators — providing data on past snowfall, temperature, atmospheric composition, and dust.

Evan Miles, a glaciologist affiliated with the universities of Fribourg and Zurich, said the cores will now be analysed in a laboratory to determine their age.

“We’re hopeful for a truly unique core — not just for this region, but possibly for a broader area — extending back 20,000 to 30,000 years,” he noted.

The apparently resilient glaciers stretch across thousands of kilometres of high mountain ranges in Central Asia, including the Karakoram, Tian Shan, Kun Lun, and Pamir ranges of Tajikistan.

By studying these ancient ice layers, scientists aim to uncover why these glaciers have resisted the global warming trend of recent decades — and whether this so-called “Karakoram anomaly” is now coming to an end.

“This whole region is globally unique,” Miles explained. “Over the last 25 years, these glaciers have shown very limited mass loss — and in some cases, mass gain.”

While some glaciers have recently begun to show early signs of decline, scientists are eager to determine whether this is a temporary variation or the onset of a long-term retreat.

“To understand that, we need a much longer record of temperature and precipitation directly from these glacier sites,” Miles said. “That’s exactly what an ice core can tell us.”

One of the extracted cores will be sent to Japan for analysis, while the second will be stored in an underground Antarctic sanctuary at minus 50°C.

That natural deep-freeze facility is part of the Ice Memory Foundation — a project supported by the Swiss Polar Institute and established in 2021 by French, Italian, and Swiss research institutions to preserve glacial archives for future generations.

“Future scientists will be able to study these samples with the most advanced technologies in 50, 100, or even 200 years,” said Ice Memory president Thomas Stocker. “We are preserving something that is disappearing because of human action.”

Stocker warned that up to 90 percent of the world’s glacier mass could vanish in the coming decades.

The scientists are scheduled to share their findings at a news conference in Dushanbe, the Tajik capital, on Monday.