Mountain glaciers are melting around the world over as average global temperatures rise a phenomenon that will be explained with a detail report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change this week.
Reuters reported that glaciers in Austria, on the eastern edge of the Alps, are particularly sensitive to climate change and have been shrinking even more rapidly than most, making it all the more urgent to examine their contents before they disappear.
There is a chance that in the next two years Austria will lose another 70 years of Ice and data gathered related to it. At the top of this mountain, researchers have drilled to the bottom of the comparatively undisturbed glacier to extract samples of its ice, which is being analyzed for information on the local climate thousands of years ago.
According to news reported, a researcher, whose work has contributed to the IPCC report, believes the ice could be 3,000 to 5,000 years old. The samples are going through lab testing to date them.
The lower layers are more densely packed than those at the top, meaning that one meter of ice could include thousands of years of data.
Alarmingly the ice is only a few meters thick. In a few years, this summit will be completely ice-free.
A researcher stated that while analysis of other materials, such as tree trunks, can provide information on the air temperature in summer, glaciers’ ice is a rare source of information on precipitation.
