SAPPORO: Dressed in an orange puffer jacket, Japanese scientist Yoshinori Iizuka stepped into a storage freezer to retrieve an ice core he hopes will help experts protect the world’s disappearing glaciers.
The fist-sized sample drilled from a mountaintop is part of an ambitious international effort to understand why glaciers in Tajikistan have resisted the rapid melting seen almost everywhere else.
“If we could learn the mechanism behind the increased volume of ice there, then we may be able to apply that to all the other glaciers around the world,” potentially even helping revive them, said Iizuka, a professor at Hokkaido University.
“That may be too ambitious a statement. But I hope our study will ultimately help people,” he said.
Thousands of glaciers will vanish each year in the coming decades, leaving only a fraction standing by the end of the century unless global warming is curbed, a study published in the journal Nature Climate Change showed Monday.
