Scientists Race to Decode Disappearing Alpine Ice Cores
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- Azzurra Spagnesi, a paleoclimatologist at the University Ca' Foscari of Venice, led a study analyzing a 30-foot ice core drilled to bedrock from the Weißseespitze glacier in the Ötztal Alps, preserving a continuous record from the 2nd to 17th centuries CE.
- The Weißseespitze core revealed lead from human activities detectable a millennium ago, plus spikes of arsenic and copper in the 13th and 16th centuries CE that researchers linked to major volcanic eruptions.
- Ice and peat samples from layers dated to around 1000 CE showed matching spikes in levoglucosan and charcoal, indicating a century-long drought drove widespread wildfires — a 'weather whiplash' pattern the article draws a direct line to in today's American West.
- The Alpine cores offer higher-resolution European atmospheric data than remote Greenland or Antarctica ice sheets because the Alps sit amid densely populated, historically industrialized Europe, as geoscientist Paul Bierman of the University of Vermont noted.
- Weißseespitze glacier is shrinking fast: a 2019 drilling reached bedrock at more than 30 feet, but a 2025 drilling in the same area hit bottom after just 18 feet, and researchers warn 30% of Ötztal Alps glaciers could vanish within five years.
- Spagnesi said the records are urgently needed to train climate models: 'We need to pass to modelers precise information about changes in past atmospheric composition… to train the models.'
Why it matters: Alpine glaciers hold a high-resolution archive of European pollution and climate history that remote ice sheets can't match, but roughly 30% of Ötztal glaciers may disappear within five years — meaning pre-industrial atmospheric records could vanish before scientists finish reading them. The 2019-to-2025 shrinkage from 30 feet to 18 feet of coreable ice quantifies just how quickly that archive is being lost.
