This article was taken from the February 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
In the Italian Alps, Renato R Colucci and his team have been carrying hefty equipment up to remote ice caves in an attempt to find out how global temperatures have changed over the past thousand years. "We are trying to characterise these permanent ice deposits located in karstic underground environments," says Colucci. The process involves drilling into what Colucci describes as "warm ice", with temperatures close to 0C in the summer and never below -10C in the winter. Unlike the ice in Antarctica and Greenland which forms from snow, the cave-ice freezes in layers, from below.
Using ground-penetrating radar, the team looks for an area free of rocks and then begins drilling, eventually extracting a cylinder of ice between five and 20 metres long. That ice is then taken to a lab in Milan -- one of only two of its kind in the world where the air temperature can be lowered to -50C -- and analysed for age and carbon content. "I'm always fascinated when I see an ancient moraine in a remote valley that can explain how the climate was thousands of years ago," explains Colucci. "And how it could be again."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
