Perched at 5,800 meters on Tajikistan's Pamir Mountains, an international team of scientists is undertaking a critical mission to secure the first deep ice cores ever extracted from this region.

The expedition, led by the Swiss-funded PAMIR Project in collaboration with Tajik and other international partners, is drilling over 100 meters into the Kon Chukurbashi ice cap.

American scientist Evan Miles, from Portland, Oregon, has been leading the expedition in Tajikistan for the last four years - often working in conditions of -25 degrees Celsius with the wind-chill.

The ice brought back to the surface from deep below the surface is like a time capsule filled with important climate data for scientists to study.

Evan Miles says: "And actually the time capsule is a great analogy for what we're doing, because we're really pulling out physical samples that are storing chemical data and physical data stored as physical properties in the ice and bringing that from potentially thousands of years to the present. "

The objective is to rescue a unique climate archive preserved for millennia within the ice.

The cores of ice, much like the rings of trees or coral beneath the oceans, can tell scientists important information - for example, how much it rained in any particular year.

"You know, one thing that we can say quite clearly, depending on how the laboratory analysis go, is the differentiation between winter and summer temperature as well as relative to present day as well as actually magnitudes of precipitation. So over the 100 or 200 year time scale we can differentiate that very, very well," says Miles.

Lab analysis will later confirm, but scientists suspect the deepest sections of the ice core might be more than 17,000 years old.

"When we look at the bed, the basal conditions and how old that ice is, we have some reason to suspect based on other ice cores in the region and the characteristics of the ice caps and so on, that it could extend well beyond the 5,000 year initial estimate and more towards 17 or 20,000-year-old ice. And we're curious to find out, we won't know for sure until we do the laboratory work, but we're hopeful at the moment," Miles says.

These glaciers contain invaluable historical data on snowfall, atmospheric chemistry, and temperature, captured in layers of ice and trapped air bubbles.

They provide an accurate record of conditions of earth at the time and known volcanic eruptions, the industrial revolution and even more recent nuclear tests can all be detected.

So ice cores are vital time capsules for scientists studying climate in the region over many thousands of years - the Pamir mountains sit at the top of the Indian subcontinent and are a vital source of water for this region.

The work has been a collaboration led by Switzerland, but involving Italian, French, American, and Japanese scientists.