The melting of glaciers caused by global warming is erasing the history of the Earth’s climate contained in them. This is demonstrated by the ice core extracted in 2020 from the Corbassière glacier on the Grand Combin massif, in the Swiss Alps: the melting process has made this area now unusable as a climate archive, erasing all the data. The confirmation comes from a study published in the journal Nature Geoscience and led by the Swiss Paul Scherrer Institute, with the important contribution of the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and the Institute of Polar Sciences of the National Research Council. The results raise fears that it is already too late for other Alpine glaciers and beyond: a race against time will be necessary to extract the last useful data where they are still intact.
Glaciers have an inestimable value for climate research: in their layers, in fact, the climatic conditions and atmospheric composition of past eras are preserved. Researchers coordinated by Margit Schwikowski compared an ice core extracted in 2018 from the Corbassière glacier with one extracted in 2020 and the difference proved to be enormous: a particularly large quantity of water due to melting penetrated deep into the ice without then refreeze, taking the substances contained with it and thus destroying the climate archive.
The authors of the study, which features Carla Huber as its first author, also examined the meteorological data in this period of time, looking for a triggering event. According to their calculations, however, the temperatures recorded on the glacier were high but in line with the general climate trend. “From this we conclude that there was no single trigger for this strong melting, but that it is the result of many warm years in the recent past,” says Schwikowski: “It seems that a threshold has been crossed.”
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