New cores from eastern European Alps glacier may help reconstruct environmental past

An international team of researchers has just begun analysing what could be the first ice cores successfully drilled from a glacier in the eastern European Alps.

The team, made up of researchers from Austria, Italy, Russia and the United States, hope that the fruit of their labour will form a record of past climate and environmental changes in the region for several centuries. If the scientists are lucky, these ice cores could even hold secrets going back 1 000 years. The team also hope that the cores contain remnants of early human activity in the region, such as the atmospheric by-products of smelting metals.

The ice cores the team are analysing are significant; scientists had previously believed that a glacier was at too low an altitude to contain ice cold enough to have preserved a clear climate record. While the top one-third of cores do show that melted water had percolated downwards, possibly affecting the record, the remaining two-thirds of the cores contained unaltered ice from which the research team should be able to retrieve a climate history.

This project is also the first to work with ice cores retrieved from the eastern side of the Alps, thereby painting a much clearer picture of climate change in this corner of Europe.

Previous research has shown that there has been an increase in summer temperatures at high elevations in the region by up to 2 degrees Celsius over the last 3 decades. Despite melting in the top parts of the cores, the researchers hope to find a record that begins in the 1980s and continues back several centuries or perhaps more.

Such impending changes to the glacier’s temperatures mean that retrieving these cores sooner rather than later is of great importance, as once they are gone so too is the valuable record of the past they hold within them.

Based on weather patterns, ice in the cores that was formed during past summers will likely paint a picture of the past climate in an area close to the mountain, perhaps only 10 kilometres to 100 kilometres away. But ice formed during past winters should provide clues to help paint a picture of a much wider area.

An analysis of the ice might also answer some important questions about the region, such as how the climate changed during the transition between the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age.