The melting glaciers caused by global warming it is erasing climate history contained in them. This is demonstrated by the ice core extracted in 2020 from Corbassière glacier on the Grand Combin massif, in the Swiss Alps: the melting process has made this area now unusable as a climate archive, deleting all data. The confirmation comes from the 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: one will be needed race against time to extract the last useful data where it is still intact.
Glaciers are invaluable for climate research: in their layers they come preserve the climatic conditions and atmospheric composition of past eras, a bit like what happens with tree rings and the sediments that settle on the bottom of the oceans. But the Corbassière glacier, from this point of view, can no longer provide useful information. The researchers coordinated by Margit Schwikowski compared one ice core extracted in 2018 with one extracted in 2020 and the difference turned out to be enormous: a particularly large quantity of water due to the melting penetrated deep into the ice without then refreezing, taking the substances it 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, therefore without extreme peaks. “From this we conclude that there was no single trigger for this strong dissolution, but which is the result of many warm years in the recent past,” says Schwikowski. “It seems like a threshold has been crossedand that this produced the consequences now observed.”
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