The ice cube from the heart of the kingdom of Goldenhorn arrived at Beijing International Airport in the Olympic bubble on Saturday 22 January 2022. The on-site team is making all the necessary preparations for a special event in the Zhangjiakou Olympic Village. In the days to come, Toli is to make the most telling act – it will melt into glacial water in front of the global Olympic audience.

On Saturday 22 January, Toli boarded a plane at Irkutsk Airport in Russia. Representatives of the Olympic Committee of Slovenia, who on Thursday 27 January picked up the transport freezer box, noticed that the box had been travelling without electricity for five days. The box arrived in China disconnected, but the Slovenian glacier, in its solid aggregate state, stood up to the challenge.

Toli will begin its transformation on the opening day of the Winter Olympics. It will be placed in a special refrigerated display case, where it will symbolically represent the melting of the world’s glaciers in artificial conditions. Just above freezing, Toli will melt and slowly flow from a special crystal platform into a crystal bowl made by the Rogaška Glassworks. The Rogaška Glassworks, an associated member of the project Mission: Triglav Glacier to Beijing, has prepared a limited number of crystal decanters for the project which will be filled with melted glacier water.

After the Beijing Winter Olympics, the melted water will be transported to the Slovenian Alpine Museum in Mojstrana, where it will be symbolically included in a permanent exhibition. Due to the warming of the atmosphere, the glacial plateau on the highest mountain in Slovenia at an altitude of just over 2,500 metres above sea level is thinning and shrinking.

In the final part of the project’s activities, after the games, the initiators and organisers of the mission will carry out a number of fun and educational activities to keep people aware of the importance of glaciers for the Slovenian high mountain range, our lives and, last but not least, winter sports in the long term. The first events will take place in February and March in the form of online talks and documentary videos. In April, the project partners of Mission: Triglav Glacier to Beijing will launch a campaign of planting 13,000 trees with the aim of decarbonising a multiple of the CO₂ emissions that will be generated by the organisation and implementation of the project.