The title made it sound like we'll never get data for those 22,000 years.
A set of expensive icicles melted. They're going to go collect more samples once they collect enough money again.
A set of expensive icicles melted. They're going to go collect more samples once they collect enough money again.
An emergency refrigeration system that works with consumable cryogenic material (say, dry ice or liquid nitrogen https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14127835) would be totally feasible and utterly inexpensive compared to the tragic costs of these cores melting.
I don't know the state of readiness of phase-change materials with appropriate transition temperatures (would need to be lower than -40 C) but if such a material exists, it'd work as well.
https://www.thermofisher.com/order/catalog/product/6214 http://www.helmerinc.com/Assets/helmer/knowledge-center/manu...
Given that it's commercially-available on freezers that get used to store critical biological material, there is no reason that a sample vault that stores irreplaceable ice cores can't have a similar, scaled-up version of this as well.