Jess McHugh is an author and journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic and TIME, among others. Her second nonfiction book, “Beg, Borrow, Scam,” is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster.
Most days on the glacier began the same. Whoever had been on polar bear watch the night before — hours of staring into the constant blizzard, rifle in hand — would make the morning coffee.
Then, after breakfast, the Italian-led team of scientists would get to work coaxing a towering aluminum drill into the ice. For three weeks in April 2023, their little compound of tents atop Holtedahlfonna, a glacier in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, Norway, was home.
Although it is more than 800 miles north of the Arctic Circle, Svalbard is warming about six to seven times faster than anywhere on Earth, driven in part by warm Atlantic currents and rapid loss of sea ice. Melting glaciers are a potent symbol of global warming as well as a rich resource of planetary history. The ice inside them is a natural time capsule of our atmosphere, containing microorganisms, pollutants, pollen and viruses from hundreds or even thousands of years ago.
“It is a library with chapters in the past,” said Catherine Larose, a Canadian microbiologist who was part of the Holtedahlfonna expedition. Deep ice cores communicate information that can’t be found anywhere else on Earth; some are essentially frozen slices of the atmosphere untainted by plastics, lead or other pollutants. “You can go back into these archives of 600 years ago, and you can get that,” Larose said.
That’s why one of the ice cores her team extracted is set to travel to the other end of the Earth. A nonprofit called the Ice Memory Foundation is sending samples from melting glaciers around the world to be preserved in Antarctica for generations to come.
This initiative, among many others, is part of a new approach to preservation that has emerged as nations around the world whiz past the climate limits set to prevent imminent collapse. Back on Svalbard, for instance, a facility called the Global Seed Vault houses millions of crop seed samples to be used in the case of war or climate calamity. And it’s not just climate efforts. Linguists and historians are making similar attempts to save various forms of cultural knowledge as they begin to disappear.
Unlike other preservation efforts to forestall coming crises, the underlying logic of this approach quietly says: Disaster is already at our doorstep.
Like the Biblical Noah loading pairs of animals onto his ark, scientists and archivists are salvaging fragile bits of our world that are at risk of disappearing forever. They’re doing everything from drilling ice cores in the Arctic and freezing endangered species’ cells to encoding ancient languages onto tiny disks sent into space. And in the process, these new Noahs are posing profound questions about what humans believe is worth saving — and how to preserve something for a distant future that we can’t quite imagine.
Frozen In Time
By the time a group of French and Italian glaciologists founded the Ice Memory Foundation in 2015, glaciers worldwide were shrinking at an accelerated rate. That same year, the State of the Climate report called the ice loss “without precedent on a global scale.” Already, cumulative mass loss since 1980 had reached 18.8 meters, or “the equivalent of cutting a 20.5 meter [67-foot] thick slice off the top of the average glacier.”
The Ice Memory Foundation’s goal was deceptively simple: take samples from 20 glaciers over the course of 20 years and store them in Antarctica for the coming centuries. The first mission took place on the Col du Dôme in the French Alps, where ice loss is especially dramatic. Glaciologists estimate that the Alps have lost a third of their volume in just the past 20 years. Since then, research teams have partnered with Ice Memory to collect samples from Tanzania, Bolivia, Italy, Russia, Tajikistan and elsewhere.
“Polar ice caps are truly the archives of our planet,” Claude Lorius, one of the founders of modern glaciology, once said. “When you dig deep, you can recover ice samples that formed during the time of Charlemagne. If you dig 100 meters, that’s from the time of Jesus Christ.” The deepest samples represent 150,000 years of history, according to Lorius — making them older than the written word by tens of thousands of years.
The ice doesn’t just keep a record of the atmosphere as it once was; it silently transcribes man’s havoc upon the world. Scientists can essentially see when the Industrial Revolution began just by studying glaciers. Cores containing European atmosphere from the mid-1800s bear the traces of heavy fossil fuel burning. Some samples from the 20th century show signs of radioactivity, Larose told me. Many contain the ubiquitous micro-plastics of our age.
“These new Noahs are posing profound questions about what humans believe is worth saving — and how to preserve something for a distant future that we can’t quite imagine.”
Climate scientists can compare different layers of a glacier to understand how a warming climate affects biodiversity. Even historians can learn from the glaciers. One 6,000-year-old sample in Greenland provided clues about ancient volcanic activity.
Getting the ice samples, however, can be incredibly dangerous. The drill site on Holtedahlfonna was about 50 miles from the closest town, so Larose and her colleagues had to lug 1.5 tons of material — drills, replacement parts, tents, first aid and three weeks’ worth of vacuum-packed lasagnas — on snowmobiles through whiteout storms.
Since help is so far away, the scientists even trained with the Red Cross to learn everything from CPR to how to treat burns from the snowmobiles or cuts from the drills. The temperatures atop the glacier, even in the spring, reached minus 22 degrees Fahrenheit. The mess tent was heated, but the individual sleeping tents were not, nor was the drill tent where they worked all day.
Only a few days into the expedition, when the drill had reached around 80 feet into the glacier, the usual sound of crunching through layers of ice changed. Now there was a sloshing noise. They had hit water. The team tried to drain the firn aquifer, doing anything they could to press on to their goal depth. In the process, they lost two drill motors because of water damage.
This was a disaster. Had they arrived too late? One of the drill operators, an Italian scientist, later said it felt like seeing the effects of climate change in real time.
As the water gushed from the heart of the glacier and the wind and snow still whipped outside, the team didn’t know what to do. Should they try to push on? Should they wait until the weather cleared? After much discussion, they made the painful decision to move the drill to another part of the glacier and start over.
“We couldn’t see anything,” Larose said, recalling what it was like to man-haul the drill across the ice. “We were just in a cloud.” By the time they dragged everything to the new location, her shoulder-length blond hair was entirely white, frozen over with snow.
After that, things went more smoothly: Within a few weeks, they were able to secure their deepest cores of about 250 feet — representing 300 to 400 years of atmospheric history.
It was a perilous endeavor, but a necessary one, the team says. “The science of the present is also built on the science of the past,” Larose said. “You’re standing on the shoulders of the previous generations.” And therefore, future generations will need to stand on her shoulders, too.
When early glaciologists such as Lorius first traveled to Antarctica in the 1950s, they likely could not have imagined that someday someone like Larose would be able to study antibiotic resistance genes within a glacier. We can’t know what questions future scientists will ask. All Larose and her colleagues can do is send their samples from the white-capped mountains of Svalbard — like frozen messages in a bottle — into the future.
What Comes After Extinction?
More than 4,000 miles from Svalbard, in a room no larger than a two-car garage, Marlys Houck has been handling a different kind of frozen material for the past 38 years. Houck is the curator of the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance’s Frozen Zoo. The collection holds the frozen cells of 1,300 animal species or subspecies kept at minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit — all packed into a single room.
Houck, a petite blonde with straight bangs, radiates the patient, steady demeanor of someone used to guiding school-aged visitors through complex ideas. These aren’t just DNA samples, she told me. Each pellet in each vial contains 1 to 3 million cells.
“They’re living cells,” she explained of the cell samples in nitrogen-cooled tanks dotting the room. “They’re just frozen living cells.”
Her team preserves animal genetic material, especially that of endangered species, both for current genetic restoration and for future research. Here’s how it works: After an animal dies at the San Diego Zoo — or sometimes while undergoing veterinary care — the Frozen Zoo will take a tissue sample. (The Frozen Zoo also receives samples from other partnerships, such as through U.S. Fish and Wildlife.) From there, the team cuts the tissue into many smaller samples, then “feeds” each with a nutrient broth. When the cells have multiplied enough for cryopreservation, they’re introduced into the collection.
“The ice doesn’t just keep a record of the atmosphere as it once was; it silently transcribes man’s havoc upon the world.”
The Frozen Zoo has the largest collection of frozen genetic material in the world, but they’re not the only ones doing this. Similar efforts are being made in Cincinnati, Berlin and London. In Australia, scientists are even cryobanking coral sperm.
Each day is different at the Frozen Zoo. The all-female team comes in at staggered times so that someone is available to “feed” the samples throughout the day. The women even have to get babysitting coverage when they go on vacation, as each sample stays in the incubator phase for about a month before it’s frozen. Whoever arrives first in the morning double checks the collection, making sure there’s enough nitrogen and that everything is functioning properly.
“It’s not all that different from our animal care staff in that you come in and you check on the babies,” Houck said. She scans through the growing samples to see which of the “babies” need food and which ones have grown large enough to be transferred to storage.
I asked Houck how they choose which animals to preserve. Who decides what survives, and how? She told me they don’t choose: They take what they can get. She estimates that they add about four species to the collection every month.
“There’s really very little forewarning, so we have to stay in this weird kind of triage capacity, taking everything we can, but with room to really stretch and take something else if we have to,” she said. It’s a question of opportunity, more than anything. The Frozen Zoo is especially keen to get samples from endangered species, but even that is a designation that’s often in flux.
“We never know when the most critical thing might die,” Houck explained.
This is a reality she has encountered firsthand. She remembers the moment precisely: It was Thanksgiving weekend in 2004. She received a call from the bird curator asking her to come in straight away. Usually, the ambiance in the Frozen Zoo is collegial, with the women helping each other out and monitoring the samples. But this day was different.
In the necropsy room, it was just Houck, the bird curator and the head pathologist. On the table in front of them was a tiny songbird with mottled white and brown feathers and a shock of black on the head. He weighed about an ounce. It was a po’ouli bird.
For years, scientists had been engaged in a mad dash to save the po’ouli. They scoured the corners of Maui’s Hana rainforest to find the rare Hawaiian finch a mate. But nothing had worked. Lying on the necropsy table in front of Houck was the last known po’ouli on Earth.
She couldn’t save the species from extinction, but she could save the cells from a second, more final death — and allow scientists to continue learning from them.
At the time, however, the zoo’s collection was mostly mammals. Houck knew how to collect an effective sample from mammal skin, but her team had struggled to do the same with birds unless they had a growing feather. She checked the po’ouli — there were none. So she made an educated guess. Her predecessor had once grown cells from a whale’s cornea. But this po’ouli had only one eye, and it was the size of a blueberry. Houck tried anyway. She wasn’t confident at all.
“We talked about it, about what it meant to lose the last bird, and the importance of trying to grow the cells,” she recalled. Exchanging glances, Houck, the pathologist and the bird curator reckoned with what this moment represented. “We don’t have cells of the dodo or the passenger pigeon or the Tasmanian tiger because these methods weren’t known then,” Houck said.
Within a few weeks, it became clear: The eye sample had worked. Houck was eventually able to grow the cells into a large enough sample to be stored. The po’ouli became the first extinct animal to have its living cells archived in the Frozen Zoo.
“Part of what we’re doing is avoiding that tragedy,” Houck said. “We want to bank cells now, while the animals are more in abundance, because we don’t know which one will be the next one to decline rapidly, right?”
In 2020, scientists were able to use a cell line from the Frozen Zoo to create an embryo for a black-footed ferret clone. The cells came from Willa, a ferret that died in the 1980s. This endangered species, which is native to the Pacific Northwest, has seen its population shrink to the point that all living black-footed ferrets are descended from just seven individuals. This poses a real problem when it comes to genetic diversity. But the cloned ferret introduced an entirely new gene pool — a major win for species restoration.
“She couldn’t save the species from extinction, but she could save the cells from a second, more final death.”
This kind of patience and persistence in the face of the unknown is key to what all of these ark-builders are doing. When Houck’s predecessor painstakingly preserved Willa’s DNA in the 1980s, she couldn’t know what it would be used for. The first successful clone of any species was about a decade away from being born.
Kurt Benirschke, the founder of the Frozen Zoo, liked to quote the American historian Daniel Boorstin whenever people asked him what the zoo’s purpose was. The quote, which now hangs on a poster in the zoo, reads: “You must collect things for reasons you don’t yet understand.”
Those who preserve things can never quite know how they’ll be used. For more than 30 years, the tiny pellet of Willa’s cells sat in a vial no larger than a ChapStick tube. And then one day, they were plucked from the collection, thawed and put to use. Just last year, Willa’s genetic daughter, Antonia, gave birth to two healthy kits.
Saving Cultural Knowledge
Trying to safeguard the things we hold dear for future generations is a profoundly human impulse. Like Houck’s predecessors, humans have always stored cultural knowledge for posterity.
This work has often accelerated in the face of a threat: a species on the brink of extinction, an archaeological site in the path of a hurricane. Think of the Irish monks more than 1,000 years ago who smuggled a collection of manuscripts to the European continent to protect them from Viking invaders. Or the real-life “Monuments Men” who hid art collections from Nazi looting.
There’s a certain tendency to believe that the things we cherish as humans have been equally cherished by our ancestors: art, poetry, literature, music, mathematical proofs and sacred texts. But what is preserved often bears the idiosyncratic thumbprint of whoever decided to store it away in the first place.
Take the seventh century Library of Ashurbanipal, named for the Assyrian king of the same name. Located in Nineveh (what is now present-day Mosul, Iraq), the library contained a collection of some 30,000 clay tablets recounting the Epic of Gilgamesh and other literary works as well as scientific and legal texts.
Ashurbanipal wasn’t a level-headed scholar calmly collecting texts, however. By most accounts he was power-hungry and paranoid, known for putting a chain through the mouth of a vanquished king and keeping him in a dog kennel. His library is full of sentimental items and many supposed magic spells aimed at maintaining his power.
A fire consumed Nineveh in the seventh century, reducing much of the city to ash. The fire had the opposite effect on the clay tablets of Ashurbanipal’s library, however. Much like a kiln, the fire baked the tablets, making them harder and more durable. It is perhaps thanks to this fire that the collection remains one of the best preserved of Mesopotamia, according to historians.
These ancient examples carry with them hope but also many warnings of all the ways precious collections can be destroyed: by fire, by flood — even through sheer and improbable accident. Consider the 13th century monk who erased a text by the Ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes — just because he’d run out of parchment.
What lasts throughout the centuries is a mixture of evolving values, resistance to natural disasters and chance — or fate, perhaps. Even when we decide that something’s worth saving, there’s the challenge of how to keep it safe for 10 — or 100 — generations to come.
This is precisely what the Long Now Foundation, another group of ark-builders, is trying to achieve. Long Now created The Rosetta Disk: a nickel disk covered in microscopic text that looks like glitter. Each of the 250 Rosetta Disks in existence — ranging from the size of a dime to about 3.5 inches — was engraved with texts from more than 1,500 languages: Swadesh lists (words like “mother,” “water” or “sneeze” that exist in every language), maps showing where those languages are spoken and translations of texts such as Genesis I and the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
“The theory is, if you spoke one variant of the 1,500 languages that are on the disk, that you can go to the biggest library in the world and unlock all the information in that library, given enough time and study,” said Andrew Warner, special projects director at Long Now. “It’s kind of the ultimate decoder ring.”
“What lasts throughout the centuries is a mixture of evolving values, resistance to natural disasters and chance — or fate, perhaps.”
The Rosetta Stone, a slab of granodiorite stela from ancient Egypt, served as the inspiration for this linguistic project. The text engraved onto the stone was banal, describing an edict. What was important, however, was that the text existed in multiple languages, including hieroglyphs — which no one understood at the time — and Ancient Greek, which scholars still read just after the Rosetta Stone was discovered in the 18th century. This allowed Egyptologists to crack the code of hieroglyphs and begin to learn this ancient language of symbols that had been completely incomprehensible for hundreds of years.
Like other ark-building projects, the Rosetta Disk was born out of loss. Linguists predict that by the end of this century, somewhere between 50% and 90% of all human languages will disappear. The reasons for this are multiple and include globalization and the increasing dominance of languages such as English and Mandarin.
These lost languages hold more than cultural traditions. Crucial, environmental knowledge is often passed down through oral traditions. Just think of the hundreds of tribes native to North America who lived on the land for tens of thousands of years, developing sustainable land practices such as controlled burns and the cultivation of native plants. As ecosystems degrade, the native folks living within them often move away, leaving fewer speakers of their language. In turn, the climate knowledge held in those languages deteriorates, too.
“We’re living in this mass linguistic extinction, for which there’s also this corresponding cultural and ecological extinction that goes along with it,” Warner said.
Protecting languages is therefore not just about protecting dialects — it’s about preserving those cultures’ ecological knowledge, their literature and their wisdom. This can’t be reliably achieved by simply encrypting thousands of languages onto a database and leaving it in a bunker. The Long Now Foundation brainstormed for years about the best way to preserve knowledge for generations — and ideally, for many centuries.
One of the main issues was the speed at which technology becomes obsolete in the digital age. Consider all the documents, songs and movies that we stored on floppy disks, cassette tapes or even CD-ROMS that are now effectively lost. The evolution and subsequent obsolescence of those technologies took place in the span of about 40 years — not 400.
This is why the Long Now Foundation decided to nano-etch their work onto nickel disks. Anyone who discovers a Rosetta Disk in the future will never need technology more complex than a magnifying glass to read it.
Long Now then sent these tiny disks to libraries around the world — and to more far-flung places, too. A Rosetta Disk exists on the moon. Another is orbiting the sun on the back of a comet, waiting for someone to come along to read it.
Letters To A Distant Future
In thinking about how to store something far into the future, the Long Now Foundation turned to an unlikely source: nuclear waste management. Nuclear waste lasts for an almost inconceivably long period of time. The half-life of uranium isotope U-235, for instance, is more than 700 million years. Preserving something for thousands of years — or, as in nuclear waste management, protecting people from it — requires a similar capacity for imagination.
Methods that seem like obvious ways of marking something to protect it — “please keep this safe” or, in the case of nuclear waste, “stay away if you want to remain safe” — are often not obvious at all. Some ancient Egyptians marked their graves with dire warnings that said, “Don’t go here. Curse unto thee for all your generations,” Warner said. And what did explorers do a few centuries later? Just barge right on in.
“We just don’t have ways of really transmitting information across thousands of years without some kind of shared culture,” Warner said. This challenge seems to have only accelerated in the present-day. The hustle of modern life is vastly out of step with the slowness required to think deeply about both the distant future in general and climate change in particular.
I spoke to Vincent Ialenti, an anthropologist and author of the book “Deep Time Reckoning,” about this problem. “When time accelerates, moments blur together; we lose track of how they fit into broader arcs of history,” he said. “And then modalities like wonder and curiosity, introspection start to erode because they’re slower modes of cognition, and we forget how to reflect and be still.”
“A Rosetta Disk exists on the moon. Another is orbiting the sun on the back of a comet, waiting for someone to come along to read it.”
Ialenti argues that all people — not just scientists or scholars — need to get better at thinking through deep time. He spent years observing Finnish nuclear authorities as they envisioned Earth 10,000 years in the future, and he has also implemented nuclear waste programs for the U.S. Department of Energy.
If knowledge is to be successfully passed on to future generations — and if Earth is to survive at all — this kind of thinking about time is necessary.
The most successful protection of cultural heritage tends to occur when it’s held up as a “vocation” or “sacred knowledge,” according to Ialenti. He gave the example of the so-called “keeper of the fabric,” the person whose job it is to maintain cultural knowledge of a specific cathedral. It’s a position that’s been passed from person to person for centuries in British cathedrals, and it’s a mix of maintenance, protection and oral history.
“Why would it ever go away if ritualistically you have to do this?” Ialenti said. “So myth, legend and ritual is the way to communicate things.”
But what does it mean to create and maintain rituals in a secular world? Does the repetitive, iterative world of scientific inquiry form a ritual?
Larose, the glacier microbiologist, said we can look to the past for clues about the future. She suspects future scientists may use her ice cores in much the same way she and her interdisciplinary colleagues do now: studying everything from pollen to pollution, just with better machines. Or they could do something else entirely — something she can’t even imagine.
“What they’ll actually measure in [the ice], hard to say,” she said with a small shrug. “Who knows?”
Nearly all the ark-builders had a similar answer when asked why they do this work. It was always inevitably vague, requiring a real leap of faith.
There’s something profoundly trusting in this shared unknown. These new Noahs do what they do because they think that someone should. And they know full well that nothing may come of their efforts. Climate change could very well cause the naturally sub-freezing storage in Antarctica to warm. The samples — so painstakingly drilled and preciously stored — could eventually melt into puddles.
The glacier sample extracted from Holtedahlfonna will eventually board an ice-breaker boat in Italy, crossing many thousands of miles to Antarctica. (The timing remains unclear, given the expense and complexity of such voyages.) A tractor sled will then drag it across the tundra. Another scientist from Ice Memory, a “keeper of the fabric,” if you will, will place the ice core deep into a snow cave.
The Ice Memory Foundation calls this man-made cave its “sanctuary,” a word that struck my ear in a certain way. It’s not a “bunker” or a “strongbox” or any of the other words we use to describe some precious thing that we are safeguarding from an imminent threat. Rather, sanctuary connotes a sacred place, hallowed ground, a peaceful place to quite literally bury the remains of a dying natural world.
There’s an inherent loss here. But there’s something else, too. A sanctuary is a place of safe haven, not a final resting place. And in this word, in this place, there’s hope baked in: that someone, someday might see a glimmer of what we saw in the ice. Or perhaps, something we didn’t see.
