Scientists drill 33 feet into a vanishing glacier to recover a 2,000-year old record of...

Scientists working on Alpine glacier (AI-generated image) Scientists drilled 33 feet into ice and recovered a 2,000-year climate record, a frozen capsule that can reveal how the atmosphere breathed long before modern measurements.High on the Weißseespitze glacier in the eastern Alps, an international research team extracted an ice core barely 33 feet long that preserves two centuries of European environmental history.Published in the official study in Frontiers in Earth Science, the research details a timeline stretching from the Roman era around the year 128 through to 1641. The upper section of the core preserves microscopic traces of ancient metal smelting, forest fire smoke, mineral dust, and far-off volcanic fallout trapped inside compressed snow layers.The research was led by Azzurra Spagnesi of Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, working alongside Pascal Bohleber of the Alfred Wegener Institute, Andrea Fischer of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and colleagues from Heidelberg University.Reading history frozen in snowAt roughly 11,480 feet above sea level, the summit ice cap acts as a high-altitude mountain mailbox. Winds carry dust, salts, smoke, and metal particles directly ...