The Svalbard Islands are part of a small archipelago in the Arctic Ocean, off the coast of Norway, with fewer than 3000 inhabitants and where the effects of climate change are obvious.
Between March and May, a group of international scientists spent around 50 days on the islands during an expedition to extract samples from the Holtedahlfonna glacier.
The expedition was led by the Polar Science Institute of the National Research Council - CNR-Isp - with the involvement of scientists from the French National Centre for Scientific Research - CNRS -, the Norwegian Polar Institute, Ca’ Foscari University Venice and the University of Perugia.
The scientists managed, through drilling, to recover three ‘cores’ of ice, two of which will be used to conduct studies, while the third will be preserved at the Ice Memory Sanctuary, an ice archive that the Ice Memory Foundation has built in Antarctica.
With this special library, the aim is to ensure that future generations of scientists have access to high-quality ice samples to study our planet’s past climate and anticipate future changes, even long after glaciers disappear.
Leading the expedition is Venetian Andrea Spolaor, researcher for the CNR’s Institute of Polar Sciences and lecturer at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice.
Spolaor is an expert on paleoclimate, and spends a lot of his time focusing on the interaction between the snowpack and the atmosphere. The researcher has made numerous expeditions, both to the Arctic and Antarctica, as well as Greenland, the Alps and Svalbard.
“Expeditions are made here because it’s closer and easier to reach, while still finding an Arctic environment,” said Spolaor.
Spolaor said that by studying the glaciers on Svalbard, they can try to understand how climate change is changing the chemical and physical composition of the snow.
In order to do this, a team of eight scientists set up a remote camp at an altitude of 1100 metres, where they spent twenty days searching for the exact spot where they could drill to retrieve ‘cores’, long cylinders of ice 74 metres deep.
“A very careful assessment of the site was made,” he explained.
“Although it was not the deepest point, it was the best, both because it was the summit and because it is one of the few known sites on Svalbard where there is cold ice … ensuring that the information stored in the ice is preserved.”
“The ice contains a code written in chemical formulae. Based on our ability to decipher the chemical code, we can trace a whole range of information about past environmental processes.”
Living and working for twenty days in temperatures that could reaching as low as minus 30 degrees was not easy, the expedition leader explained.
“We slept in unheated tents, only the kitchen tent and the ‘living room’ tent were heated to a temperature of 5 degrees,” he said.
“But the problem was when the temperature outside rose and reached zero, because then it was snowing and windy”.
As is often the case, the path that led Spolaor to develop an interest in these subjects was “by a series of coincidences”. After graduating as a chemical expert, he enrolled in the Faculty of Environmental Sciences, specialising in environmental chemistry.
“After university it was not my intention to stay in academia, I had thought of going into private work,” he revealed.
“In the last year of my Master’s degree I met Professor Barbante, who later became Director of my Institute, who was going to Antarctica, and curiosity prompted me to try.
“I then did my PhD on paleoclimate and past climate variations and from there, a whole series of opportunities arose, such as expeditions to Svalbard and Antarctica, which helped me to understand what was missing from a scientific point of view on the study of ice cores.”
The scientist pointed out how quickly the situation has changed on Svalbard over the last decade.
“The climate and also the landscape have changed so much in so few years.”
For the scientific community, it is difficult to predict what will happen, but as Spolaor pointed out, “since there is a correlation between carbon dioxide and temperatures, it is also plausible to think that the CO2 we put into the atmosphere will influence climate change”.
The response to the climate emergency should come from everyone doing their part, but serious political action and global coordination are needed.
In the meantime, as Spolaor suggests, we should start with information.
