India, Oct. 14 -- Tajikistan became the first country to donate two ice cores to the international scientific community -- one each to the Pamir Research programme and the Ice Memory sanctuary in Antarctica on Monday.

The ice cores were collected from the Kon Chukurbashi area of Pamir, one of the regions covered by what the scientific community calls the "Karakoram Anomaly".

Ice cores are a vertical column of ice extracted from glaciers and ice-sheets; they hold records of what the planet was like hundreds of thousands of years ago. Older ice cores could be between 500,000 and 800,000 years old.

On September 24, an international team of scientists launched a new ice coring expedition on the Pamir Mountains , Tajikistan, at an altitude ...