ИСТИНА

Ice cores preserve records of past climatic fluctuations and moisture transport mechanisms, providing essential archives of both natural and anthropogenic influences. As glaciers respond to climate warming, accumulation areas are increasingly affected by melt, even at high elevations, damaging the preserved climate signal. Despite repeated attempts over the past three decades, no deep ice cores have yet been extracted from the Pamir mountains of Central Asia. Past efforts have succeeded to recover 10m and 40m cores from Fedchenko Glacier and Mustagh Ata, spanning multi-year and multi-decade periods, respectively, but the difficulty of logistics in this region has limited more extensive efforts. A successful ice core in this region could provide important information relating to long-term changes in moisture supply rates and sources. This is essential to constrain the chronology of glacier changes within the region, while also providing clues about the glaciers’ future trajectory. Here we identify a candidate coring site at 5800m in the Murghab region of Tajikistan, Kon Chukurbashi ice cap, and the results of our investigations at the location in 2024, undertaken as part of the PAMIR project. We highlight the suitability of the site in terms of scientific promise as well as logistical and operational feasibility. We present a basic characterization of the site’s firn structure based on density, stratigraphy, and stable water isotope measurements from a shallow firn core, which show thin annual refreezing layers and clearly preserved seasonal precipitation sourcing. From these data, we determine recent accumulation rates of 0.28 m w.e./a, on average, for the past few years. Our survey of the summit’s ice thickness shows clear basal reflections at approximately 105m ice thickness, as well as a superficial firn layer of approximately 40m. Taken together, the site characteristics and prospects for field logistics make this a promising site for recovering an ice core to analyze centennial-scale variations in atmospheric chemistry and climate.