The glaciers of the Arctic are losing
their memory too: the melting caused by global warming is
rapidly wiping out, here too, precious data on the Earth's past
climate contained in them, according to an international study
published in the journal The Cryosphere and led by Italy's
National Research Council's (CNR) Polar Sciences Institute and
by Venice's Ca' Foscari University.
The research, to which the Lecce-based CNR Atmosphere and
Climate Sciences Institute and the University of Perugia also
contributed, focused on the glaciers of the Svalbard Islands,
and confirms the results of a recent similar study carried out
in the Swiss Alps: also in that case the Corbassière Glacier
proved to be now useless as a climate archive.
In order to save these archives, in 2023 researchers working on
the Ice Memory and Sentinel projects carried out a complex
campaign of drilling in the Holthedalfonna Glacier, succeeding
in extracting three deep core samples of ice.
The hope is that the samples may still contain usable climate
information.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED © Copyright ANSA
