(C)old.Ice- Insights into late Holocene Alpine climate

This projects contributes to global efforts by providing new climate information extracted from ice cores in the Eastern Alps. Here we observe one of the most extensive deglaciation processes on the globe which threatens the ice archives containing records of the last 6 millennia. Extreme melt events and warm periods can be identified by radiometric dating of the various annual layers in the core. In this way we can find out how unique and extreme the current conditions are in comparison with the past. Warm periods and extreme melt events as associated with the anthropogenic warming; extreme ice losses of the last two decades will be very likely the most prominent features in the record. Ice enclosures like Sahara dust point out past weather patterns and help us understand changes in northern hemispherical climate patterns. In addition to that, the novel method of pollen analysis in ice sharpens the dating of the core and at the same time hints at human activities in the Eastern Alps. In recent projects we drilled the first ice core in the Austrian Eastern Alps to the ground at Weißseespitze in Kaunertal (3500 m), found out that the lowest ice roughly corresponds to the period of Ötzi the ice man. Complementary to this core, we will drill ice cores from a site at the same elevation as Weißseespitze, but with different precipitation (Sonklarspitze, Stubai Alps, 3463 m), and fill elevation gaps in the Alpine records with cores from Großvenediger, Hohe Tauern (3666 m) and Jamtalferner, Silvretta, (3099 m). Two samples from basal ice layers/ground from two disappearing glaciers will reveal any possible facts behind the fairy tales of advancing Alpine glaciers.