Even the Arctic glaciers are losing their memory: the melting caused by global warming is rapidly erasing the precious data they contain on the Earth’s past climate here too. This is indicated by the international study published in the journal The Cryosphere and led by the Institute of Polar Sciences of the National Research Council and the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. The research, to which the Institute of Atmospheric and Climate Sciences of the Cnr of Lecce and the University of Perugia also contributed, focused on the glaciers of the Svalbard islands, and confirms the results of a recent similar study conducted on the Swiss Alps: even in that case the Corbassière glacier has now proven unusable as a climate archive.
From 2012 to 2019, researchers analyzed the evolution of the Holtedahlfonna glacier, one of the highest in the Svalbard archipelago, discovering that the climate signal visible in 2012 had completely disappeared in 2019. “We have to think about the ice layers like pages of an ancient manuscript that scientists are able to interpret”, explains Andrea Spolaor of the Cnr-Isp, first author of the study: “Even if the evidence of atmospheric warming is still preserved, the seasonal climate signal has been lost” .
Precisely to save these archives, in 2023 the researchers involved in the Ice Memory and Sentinel projects completed a complex drilling campaign on the Holthedalfonna glacier, managing to extract three deep ice cores. The hope is that these samples still contain usable climate information. “The results of this research, highlighting the threat that the effects of climate change represent, underline the need to preserve the glacial archives and the related climatic information – concludes Jacopo Gabrieli of the Cnr-Isp and one of the authors of the study – now at risk cause of global warming”.
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