Scientists have discovered a rare natural anomaly in Tajikistan’s Pamir Mountains—a glacier that is growing in size despite the widespread retreat of glaciers worldwide due to climate change.
According to the international science magazine Popular Mechanics, an expedition earlier this year to the Pamir Mountains in Tajikistan retrieved two ice cores from a glacier that seems to be perplexingly increasing in size.
An international team of researchers reportedly conducted an expedition to the Kon-Chukurbashı ice cap, located at an altitude of around 5,810 meters above sea level. Observations showed that the glacier has been expanding, even as most glaciers across the planet continue to shrink.
During the expedition, scientists extracted two ice cores, each more than 100 meters long. One sample was sent to the Ice Memory Foundation’s underground archive in Antarctica for long-term preservation of climate data. The second core was transported to the Institute of Low Temperature Science at Hokkaido University in Japan, where it will be analyzed by Professor Yoshinori Iizuka to determine the factors behind the glacier’s unusual stability.
Researchers say the ice cores contain up to 30,000 years of climate records. The data are expected to shed light on why the Kon-Chukurbashı glacier continues to grow and what this phenomenon could mean for the future of glaciers worldwide.
The Kon-Chukurbashı ice cap is located in the Sarykol Range of the Pamir Mountains in eastern Tajikistan, within the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region (GBAO), close to the border with China. The glacier formed on the slopes of Mount Kon-Chukurbashı, which rises 5,811 meters above sea level.
The area is a remote high-altitude plateau characterized by a harsh continental climate and minimal human presence. Due to its isolation and extreme conditions, access to the ice cap is largely limited to scientific expeditions.
