This project will extract ice-cores from a remote Alpine glacier in Italy and secure them in freezers at the Byrd Polar Research Center in Columbus, Ohio to enable future research on paleo-environments. As globally averaged surface temperatures increase it is important to consider how physical and human systems respond to and interact with climate. There is a lack of paleo-environmental information from remote sites such as high altitude glaciers that are essential to link physical and human systems. South Tyrol is a unique area in the European Alps with a very rich human history. Its highest glacier, the Alto dell'Ortles (3905 meters) constitutes an important observational point to study past changes in climate, ecosystems and human society. This part of Tyrol is characterized by the lowest precipitation rate in the European Alps and thus its glaciers are likely to contain ice histories older than those from other Alpine locations. The potential of Mt. Ortles ice field has not been explored, mainly due to the difficult logistical access. Mt. Ortles is located only about 30 km from where the famous 5,200 year old Tyrolean Ice Man emerged from an ablating ice field. This discovery suggests that the last few decades were the warmest on record over the last 5,200 years in this region of the Alps. Indeed glaciers are rapidly shrinking in this area and it is a high priority to retrieve this unique paleo-environmental glacial archive from Mt. Ortles before it is lost. This salvage mission will ensure the possibility of obtaining the preserved information with the potential to highlight relationships regulating climate, ecosystems and human society in the Tyrolean Alps during the last millennium.
The ice cores have the potential to advance the understanding of past and future changes in climate, vegetation, and land use in a region of the Alps. The Mt. Ortles ice core histories will fill an important gap in the spatial distribution of ice cores retrieved from the European Alps. Ultimately their records will offer a unique yardstick to be compared with other European records and those from low-latitude sites where records of climate, ecosystems, and human societies have been extracted.
This project, conducted by The Ohio State University scientists and various European colleagues, retrieved four cores from a glacier high atop Mount Ortles, a 3,905-meter (12,812-feet) peak in northwestern Italy. Three were 75 meters long (246-foot) and one was 60 meters (197 feet). They are significant in two ways: first, scientists had previously believed that the glacier was at too low an altitude to contain ice cold enough to have preserved a clear environmental record. While the top one-third of the cores do show that melt water had percolated downwards, possibly affecting the record, the remaining two-thirds of the cores contains ice with an annual resolution signal from which it will be possible to retrieve an environmental history. Secondly, since no other ice core analyses have been retrieved from the eastern side of the Alps, this work should paint a much clearer picture of environmental change in this portion of Europe. The drilling operation highlighted that, due to the ongoing rapid rising of atmospheric temperatures, this glacier is changing from the top down in an irreversible way, from a ‘cold’ glacier where the ice is stable to a ‘temperate’ glacier where the ice can degrade. This glacier may transition very soon to a temperate state. This made the retrieval of these cores now even more important so that the ice record won’t be lost for future research. Preliminary analysis indicates that is possible to obtain a record that begins in the 1980s and proceeds back at least several centuries, or perhaps more as indicated by a larch needle discovered in the bottom ice and dated 2650 years ago.
