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Roads to avoid as people travel for a bank holiday weekend away
It is the last long weekend before the summer holidays and many people will be going away
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American on Interpol’s wanted list found during routine check in France
He is accused of sexually assaulting a student at a Pennsylvania college in 2013
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EXPLAINED: Why France has declared state of emergency in New Caledonia
Three people have been killed in riots since the start of the week
Ice cores hold global memories
While France headed for the beach last month scientists from Grenoble University were 4,260m up Mont Blanc in a race against time to remove a giant ice core which contains a unique centuries- long environmental record.
The 130metre core (called a carotte in French) from the Col du Dôme glacier is like a diary of the world’s atmosphere since the birth of the glacier, as trapped air bubbles contain whatever was in the atmosphere at the time the ice was formed.
Measuring the methane and CO2 allows scientists to map climatic changes from centuries before the first recordings – and, possibly, calculate the rate of climate change and its effects.
Anne-Catherine Ohlmann, spokeswoman for the Sauvegarder la Mémoire de la Glace project, said: “It’s going really well and the first sections are safely stored in our freezer.” The ice core will be flown to the French-Italian Concordia research base in Antarctica, where it will be stored along with others from other glaciers around the world until there is funding to research and map the trapped gases.
With Alpine and other glaciers melting it is a race against time. Geophysicist Jérôme Chappellaz, leader of the Protecting Ice Memory project, says their aim is to save this information which has already shown that temperatures at the Col du Dôme rose by 1.5C between 1194 and 2005.