By: Tim Radford, 12/23/2013
Photo Credit: Louis Vest/flickr
LONDON – It was only a single, withered conifer needle, but it told a dramatic story of climate change. Glaciologists found it in a set of ice cores drilled through a glacier on top of Mount Ortles, in the Italian Alps. It lay about 80 meters (262 feet) below the glacial surface, encased in solid ice, and carbon dating confirmed that it had blown from the branches of Larix decidua, the European larch, 2,600 years earlier. It was found about 30 kilometers (18.6 miles) from a far more dramatic exposure: the body of Ötzi the Iceman, a mummified Bronze Age corpse revealed by a melting glacier in 1991. Both finds deliver the same uncompromising message: for at least 5,000 years – because Ötzi perished around that time – the Italian Alps had continued to stay frozen throughout the year. And now they are melting.
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