Unless global warming is capped below 2°C, Switzerland’s glaciers may disappear altogether by 2100. The world’s oldest ice core – on its way to Berne At the beginning of 2025, a European research team in Antarctica successfully drilled a 2,800-metre-long ice core reaching all the way down to the bedrock. This continuous sample, extracted as part of the EU-funded Beyond EPICA project, provides an unprecedented record of the Earth’s climate spanning over 1.2 million years. Initial analyses suggest that at least 13,000 years of data are compressed into one metre of ice. The University of Bern has a hand in the project. Its Climate and Environmental Physics division specialises in measuring greenhouse gas concentrations found in small air bubbles that are trapped in the ice. “We can begin our studies in autumn,” says climate physician Hubertus Fischer, who is looking forward to taking receipt of the Antarctic samples and gaining a new awareness of the Earth’s ice age cycles. “There was an ice age every 40,000 years around 1.5 million years ago. As we know, this cycle later slowed to 100,000 years.” Researchers want to know why – and Fischer believes that greenhouse gases provide the smoking gun. “If we have a better understanding of what happened in the past, we will be more able to predict what may happen in the future.” -50°C in the storage room The valuable cargo from Antarctica is expected to arrive in Berne this summer. To house the ice, the university has built a bespoke new cold store with an ambient temperature of -50°C. Ice samples in Berne have been stored at a temperature of -25°C until now. “The ice must be kept in very cold conditions for certain analyses. This prevents the properties of the ice from changing,” Fischer explains. An emergency generator maintains the cold chain in the event of a power cut. Scientists in Antarctica cut the ice core into one-metre-long sections, before the cargo was shipped northwards through the sweltering tropics of the Atlantic and across the Mediterranean to Italy – at a temperature of -50°C. The journey continued overland to the northern German city of Bremerhaven, where the samples were cut into even smaller pieces at the Alfred Wegener Institute, before being sent on their way to participating research centres around Europe, including Berne. (TP) www.beyondepica.eu www.ice-memory.org The Ice Memory programme aims to obtain ice cores from 20 endangered glaciers around the world within 20 years; besides the Alps, other locations include Norway, the Caucasus Mountains, the Andes and the Himalayas. A planned mission to Mount Kilimanjaro in 2022 fell foul of bureaucracy in Tanzania. Africa’s highest mountain is home to the continent’s last remaining glacier, which is likely to disappear by 2040. Swiss Review / July 2025 / No.3 13
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