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.
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