When Margit Schwikowski helicoptered up to Switzerland’s Corbassière glacier in 2020, it was clear that things weren’t right. “It was very warm. I mean, we were at 4,100 meters and it should be sub-zero temperatures,” she says. Instead, the team started to sweat as they lugged their ice core drill around, and the snow was sticky. “I thought, ‘This has never happened before.’”
What Schwikowski couldn’t see yet, but would find later in the lab, is that it wasn’t just the surface that was affected: Climate change had penetrated the ice and trashed its utility as an environmental record. Warming weather had created meltwater that trickled down, washing away trapped aerosols that researchers like her use as a historical record of forest fires and other environmental events. Because of the melt, she says, “we really lose this information.”
Schwikowski, an environmental chemist at the Paul Scherrer Institut near Zurich, is the scientific lead for the Ice Memory Foundation, a collaborative group that aims to preserve glacial ice records before climate change wre... Read more
