Tracking past cave glaciations in the Alps

In recent decades, the cryosphere has been responding rapidly to atmospheric warming. These changes are especially pronounced in highly sensitive areas such as mountain environments and have led to a dramatic retreat of mountain glaciers and the degradation of permafrost. Past climate records that can be precisely dated are critical to better understand how changes across mountain landscapes may unfold in the near future. The climate during the last glacial period (from 115 to 11.7 thousand years ago) was highly variable, with rapid transitions from colder and drier to milder and wetter intervals. In the Alps, these climatic fluctuations led to changes in the altitudinal extent of the permafrost. This project aims to trace changes in mountain permafrost from the end of the last glacial period to the beginning of our present interglacial by using a unique type of cave carbonates (known as cryogenic cave carbonates) that forms in perennial ice when the cave air temperature is slightly below 0C.