The deepest and most ancient ice on Monte Ortles has begun to move for the first time since the days of Ötzi the Iceman, 7,000 years ago, due to climate warming. The discovery comes from an international study in which the Institute for the Dynamics of Environmental Processes of the National Research Council (Idpa-Cnr) and the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center at Ohio University took part, published in the international journal The Cryosphere. The research was funded by the US National Science Foundation and the Autonomous Province of Bolzano.

The results have shed light on a new process that could accelerate the movement of Alpine glaciers even at the highest altitudes, contributing to speeding up their retreat. The causes of this process are attributable to climate change, as Paolo Gabrielli, the study's lead researcher, explains: "Alpine glaciers are retreating rapidly due to the intense melting associated with atmospheric warming."

Ice cores for studying climatic eras

Ice cores offer scientists "the exceptional opportunity to study the characteristics of the atmosphere when Ötzi the Iceman was living in this region, so that we can also learn about the environment and climate in which he was immersed," explained Carlo Barbante, director of Idpa-Cnr in Venice. The first ice cores extracted on Monte Ortles at 3,905 m, in the Eastern Alps, 37 kilometres from the site where Ötzi was found, indicate that the highest glacier in South Tyrol has entered a phase of accelerated movement with no precedent in the period observed.

Using the ice cores, researchers are analysing ice samples by identifying stable oxygen isotopes, major ions, carbon particles, pollen, trace elements and dust — parameters that could provide important information on climatic conditions going back 7,000 years. Among the information preserved in the ice, researchers have identified, for example, the signal of radioactive atmospheric deposits resulting from the accident at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan in March 2011, only a few months before the drilling operations on Ortles.

One of the extracted cores could become part of the Ice Memory Project, an international programme whose aim is to transport ice cores extracted from low latitudes to an international archive located in Antarctica, where they can be preserved intact for future generations of scientists.

How the Ortles glacier was formed

Thanks to the study's findings, researchers were able to establish that the Ortles glacier, as we know it today, formed approximately 7,000 years ago, at the end of the so-called Northern Hemisphere 'Climatic Optimum', a particularly warm period during which Alpine glaciers retreated to high altitudes. Subsequently, the onset of a cooler period, known as the Neoglacial, contributed to the accumulation of snow and ice on the newly frozen ground near the summit of Ortles. During this new climatic period, the mummy of Ötzi the Iceman was also buried, remaining in the ice until the end of summer 1991, when it emerged near the Tisenjoch pass at an altitude of 3,210 metres.

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