Starting point: Even before the glaciers begin to retreat and eventually disappear, the ongoing atmospheric warming threatens to erase forever extremely important information on our climatic and environmental history that has been preserved within the ice for centuries and millennia.

Do glaciers have some sort of memory? Yes, ice can be seen as a kind of “hard disk” containing many files. The snow, deposited year after year over centuries on the highest glaciers of the Alps, records the temperature of and contaminants in the atmosphere through which it falls. Our idea is to extract from the Ortler the very first ice core from the Eastern Alps in order to study historical temperatures, snowfall and pollution in South Tyrol. In preparation, we were the first glaciologists to scale the peak of the Ortler in June 2009, with the help of mountain guides from Sulden (South Tyrol), in order to study the ice at its summit (almost 4,000 metres). We took samples of surface snow and measured the thickness of the glacier (70 metres!).
What did we find? There is both good and bad news. The good news is that the ice recorded information on a regular basis until 1980. The ice cap of the Ortler has acted like a computer hard disk that has registered data of past climatic events. The bad news is that due to rapid warming in the last 30 years, the snow on the surface is melting at an increasing rate. The melt water of the upper layers reaches the layers underneath and can delete all traces of the past temperatures our research is interested in. It is as if the hard disk, containing all the data we are trying to recover, were formatted. There is little hope that things will change… Forecasts give little hope, giving the prospect of the climate again warming considerably within the coming decades. This would impact our glacial memory badly, by deleting all the files it contains…

Conclusion: We need to act quickly in order to extract the ice core before it is too late…