Italian Alps Glacier, Unchanged for Thousands of Years, is Now Melting

The Italian Alps have remained unchanged for thousands of years. Now, though, scientists have taken some new ice cores from this location and have discovered that the Alps have been strongly warming since the 1980s. The findings reveal that as our climate changes, ice is continuing to melt across snowy regions.

In order to learn a bit more about the area's present and past climate, the researchers drilled a set of ice cores from atop Mt. Ortles in northern Italy. The Alto dell'Ortles glacier, which has not shown signs of melting for thousands of years, now appears to be shifting away from a constantly below-freezing state to one where its upper layers are at the melting point throughout the year.

"Our first results indicate that the current atmospheric warming at high elevation in the Alps is outside the normal cold range held for millennia," said Paolo Gabrielli, one of the researchers, in a news release. "This is consistent with the rapid, ongoing shrinking of glaciers at high elevation in this area."

In fact, the researchers found that the first 100 feet of the glacier was composed of "firn." This is grainy, compacted snow that had partly melted. Below that there was nothing but solid and colder ice all the way down to the frozen bedrock.

So what does this mean? The findings suggest that snow was accumulating on the mountaintop and was compacted into ice for thousands of years without ever melting--until about 30 years ago. That's when each year's new deposit of snow began melting. Before that, the glacier remained unchanged for a very long time; an unearthed leaf that was about 2,600 years old dates the glacier melting to relatively recently.

Currently, the researchers are still trying to determine why temperatures in the Alps are increasing at twice the global rate. They're taking a closer look at glaciers as they attempt to understand how climate change will influence these mountains and the surrounding environment.

"Ortles offers us the unique opportunity to closely verify if and how regional environmental changes can interact with climatic changes of global significance," said Gabrielli in a news release.

The findings were presented at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.