Last week glaciologists extracted their third and final ice core from a glacier on the Col Du Dôme, just beneath the summit of Mont Blanc in the French Alps. This dramatic mission, which involved helicoptering scientists and their equipment to an altitude of 4,300m, is a bid to save the data stored in the ice, before melting disrupts the chronological layers – average temperatures in the region have already risen by 1.5°C.

The Mont Blanc drilling is the first operation of the “Protecting Ice Memory” project, which aims to collect some of the world’s most vulnerable ice cores and store them in a snow cave in Antarctica. “We need to preserve these cores now, because new scientific techniques will emerge and scientists will be able to learn even more from these cores in the future,” says Patrick Ginot from the Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, who is co-leading the UNESCO supported project.

Of the three 130-metre cores extracted at Col Du Dôme (each recording around 150 years of climate) one will be analysed now and the remaining two will be airlifted in specially chilled containers to the Concordia Research Station on Antarctica.

For Ginot and his colleagues the drilling on Mont Blanc this year serves as a warm up. Next year they plan to drill the Illimani glacier, situated at an altitude of 6,400m in the Bolivian Andes. Too high for helicopters, everything will have to be carried up to this remote site, but the reward for this slog will be an ice core containing as much as 20,000 year’s worth of data.