Correspondences between temperature increasing and glacier area loss on high elevation environments: case study on Mt. Grand Combin Pennines Alps.

Abstract

This study presents an analysis concerning the dramatic development of the current climatic changes and the impact on the glacier extension on high-altitude Alpine areas. The study focused on the analysis of the Corbassiere glacier, on the Grand Combin, on the border between Italy and Switzerland. The glacier was introduced in the international ICE MEMORY (IM) PROJECT for the protection and conservation of ice cores from different mountain sites around the world. The climatic signal from high altitude glaciers are much more local than that of polar glaciers, therefore the information contained is particularly important with regard to atmospheric and anthropogenic pollution; this study aims to identify the change in glacier extension from the end of the Little Ice Age (LIA) due to rise of temperature and to observe the possible effectiveness of the current efforts to control and reduce atmospheric pollution. The thesis will focus on the analysis first of the climatic changes that have occurred in the last 150 years, deepening the study on the cryosphere and on ice cores. A meteorological analysis will be carried out over a very long daily temperature and precipitation series (1865 – 2019) combined with a geomorphological analysis of the change in glacier extension from 1892 to 2018 and with a chemical analysis for comparison between isotopes extracted from two different ice cores (2016 and 2018) and the temperature behaviour during the last decade. This study shows a loss of glacial mass of the Corbassiere glacier from the end of the LIA till today, and the agreement between the reduction rate and the thermal oscillation. However, the examined case shows a less negative trend compared to the average of alpine glacier. For the chemical analysis, a good agreement was observed between isotopes and temperature, as a consequence of seasonal variability.