It is Austria’s second largest glacier: the Gepatschferner in the Tyrolean Kaunertal, at the western end of which lies the 3498 meter high Weißseespitze. Glacier researchers from the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) used their summit as a test subject for a new study. The result: alarming. The current mass loss of the Alpine glaciers is significantly higher than the average of the past 6000 years. This is shown by analyzes of ice cores taken from the summit’s ice cap.
“Because of the limited ice movement there, the ice cap of the summit is the ideal place for a comparison of climate and mass balance between the past and the present,” says Andrea Fischer from the Institute for Interdisciplinary Mountain Research. There is still ten meters of ice there, the bottom layer of which is around 6,000 years old.
0.6 meter loss per year
In the current study, a research team led by Andrea Fischer took and analyzed ice cores from the Weißseespitze. The researchers combined the results with data from other sources, such as historical records and instrumental measurements dating back to 1770 in the Alps.
The Weißseespitze glacier is currently losing an average of 0.6 meters of ice per year. Between 1893 and 2018, a total of around 40 meters of ice melted. The scientists expect that in about ten years the ice cap will have completely disappeared.
Meteorological observations of the ice cap, carried out for the first time, have shown that in the three years of the study, most of the accumulation – i.e. the deposition of snow – took place between October and December and from April to June. Wind erosion prevented this snow deposition between January and March.
The melt occurred between June and September, affecting mostly freshly fallen snow and only affecting glacial ice for short periods, mainly in August. But today, just a few days of ice melt would be enough for a negative mass balance with a complete loss of annual accumulation, the researchers say. Such melting events at this altitude have been isolated cases in the past.
Such extreme events stored in the ice are of enormous interest to the researchers, because outliers in particular will continue to be decisive for the safety of settlements in the Alps in the future. The data from the drill cores should help to create models for future flood events.
Source: Nachrichten
