Hybrid Event, 14/01/2026
The Ice Memory Foundation will inaugurate the Ice Memory Sanctuary in Antarctica on Wednesday, 14 January 2026, at 10.00 CET. The event will take place within the framework of the UN Decade of Action for the Cryospheric Sciences (2025–2034) and will be held as a live broadcast from Concordia Station, Antarctica.
Organized by the Ice Memory Foundation together with its founding partners Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and CNR (Italy), Université Grenoble Alpes, CNRS and IRD (France), the inauguration will celebrate the establishment of the Ice Memory Sanctuary and the storage of the first glacier ice cores preserved in Antarctica for the benefit of future generations.
The Ice Memory Foundation is carrying out an international ice-drilling project to retrieve and preserve glacier ice cores. The selected glaciers are chosen for their urgent need for preservation, their capacity to provide high-quality scientific records and their contribution to broad geographical and temporal coverage. These preserved ice cores offer invaluable insights into past atmospheric composition, environmental conditions and climate history.
The first Ice Memory alpine ice cores, extracted between 2016 and 2023, will leave the CNR-ISP laboratory cold rooms in Venice in October for a historic journey from Europe to the Antarctic Plateau, where the annual mean temperature of –50°C provides a naturally secure environment for the long-term preservation of these fragile archives.
