GALTÜR, Austria — Jumping from rock to rock
to rock over a creek formed off Austria’s Jamtal glacier, scientist Andrea
Fischer worries that precious scientific data will be irreversibly lost as the
snow and ice melt faster than ever.
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“I couldn’t have imagined that it would ever melt as
dramatically as this summer. ... Our ‘archive’ is melting away,” says the
glaciologist.
Fischer — vice director of the Institute for
Interdisciplinary Mountain Research at the Austrian Academy of Sciences — has
spent more than 20 years surveying Jamtal and four other Alpine glaciers across
Austria’s highest peaks for the oldest areas of ice.
For scientists looking to reconstruct the
Earth’s
climate in the distant past, such ice formations are a unique time capsule
stretching back thousands of years.
The glaciers
contain an invaluable treasure trove of data — as they grew, the ice
encapsulated twigs and leaves, which can now be carbon-dated, Fischer explains.
And based on the age of such material and the depth
where it was found, scientists can infer when ice grew during colder periods,
or when warmer conditions caused it to melt.
But now the glaciers are melting rapidly — including
the one in the remote and narrow Jamtal valley, not far from where tourists
found the stunningly preserved 5,300-year-old mummy of Oetzi, the Iceman, in
the 1990s.
Temperatures in Europe’s highest mountains have
risen by nearly 2°C in the past 120 years — almost double the global average,
according to the International Commission for the Protection of the Alps.
The Alps’ roughly 4,000 glaciers have since become
one of the starkest signs of global warming.
Disappear completely?
The Jamtal glacier has been
losing about 1m from its surface annually, but this year it has already lost
more than a meter, Fischer says.
“And we’ve got at least two months of summer left
... where the glacier is entirely exposed to the sun,” she warns.
Snow usually protects most of the glacial ice from
the sun until September, but the little snow that fell last winter had already
melted by early July.
“This year is outrageous compared to the average of
the past 6,000 years,” says Fischer.
“If this continues, in five years, Jamtal glacier
won’t be a glacier anymore.”
By the end of the summer, Fischer fears that about
7m of depth will have melted off the surface — or about 300 years of climate
“archives”.
“We need the data the glaciers hold to understand
the climate of the past — and to create models of what awaits us in the
future,” she says.
Fischer and her team have drilled on both the Jamtal
and other nearby glaciers to extract data, taking out ice samples up to 14m
deep.
As temperatures rise and the glaciers become more unstable,
they are compelled to take additional safety precautions — 11 people died in a
glacial ice avalanche in the Italian Dolomites in July, the day after
temperatures there rose to new records.
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