There is a profession that could disappear in a few years: the glaciologist. In a few decades, the glacier scholar will be out of work due to a lack of raw material. “In 2050, half of the glaciers in the Alps will melt, and at the end of the century only a few traces will remain above 3,500 meters high”, explains Carlo Barbante, professor of analytical chemistry at the Ca ‘Foscari University of Venice and co-creator of Ice Memory , the international project for the study and conservation of ice cores extracted from glaciers around the world.
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Ice Memory: preserve the data contained in glaciers
Like a library
Glaciers, in addition to being a fundamental water, energy and tourist resource, are like a library or, with a comparison more suited to current times, a database. They contain not only valuable data on climate changes that have occurred in the last millennia, but also information on volcanic eruptions, nuclear explosions and human activities. A heritage that could be entirely lost with their dissolution. «Last September we sampled at 4,100 meters in the Corbassier glacier, on the Grand Combin, between Italy and Switzerland. We found water at the bottom of the drilling », remembers Barbante, director of the Institute of Polar Sciences of the Cnr. “It means that the glacier had lost the ability to give us useful information. It is as if an ancient manuscript had become wet, the ink diluted and the words no longer legible ».
On Monte Rosa
This is why the Ice Memory researchers (with the contribution of Cnr) at the beginning of May pointed the Gorner ice to Colle Gnifetti on Monte Rosa, a site that, due to its relative glacial stability, should have been among the last to be analyzed (at the moment the scholars have been blocked by winds at high altitudes at over 100 kilometers per hour, but they will climb the glacier in the coming weeks as soon as the weather forecast makes it possible, ed). On the Grand Combin the situation had deteriorated so much in just four years that it was decided to anticipate sampling on the Rosa, even if the altitude is higher and potentially safe from a rapid merger.
There is little time left
“Until recently there was talk of climate change, today I prefer to call it a climate crisis,” says Barbante. “The situation is dramatic, there is little time left to secure the information from our glaciers. From the mid-nineties to 2016, the ice temperature at 4,300 meters at the Col de Dôme on Mont Blanc increased by 2 degrees: it is not only the surface, but the whole ice mass that is heating up in an impressive way ».
In Antarctica the sanctuary of the ice of our mountains
But besides the analysis and the study, what is the ultimate goal of Ice Memory? “We want to create a world bank of data contained in the ice, intended for future generations who will have technologies that will allow them to study the finds even more accurately,” explains Barbante. «For this reason we intend to transfer carrots extracted from the Alps to the South Pole from 2024, but also to the Andes, Caucasus, Altai, Himalayas, Rocky Mountains and next year to Kilimanjaro. We have already identified the suitable storage site in Concordia, the Italian-French base in the middle of Antarctica at an altitude of 3,200 meters, where the average temperature is 52 degrees below zero ». We hope to make it in time.
May 7, 2021 (change May 7, 2021 | 16:25)
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