Glacier scientists are investigating the appearance of pink ice at Italy’s Presena Glacier, an Alpine region known for skiing and outdoor sports. Research suggests the algae could contribute to increased glacial melt.
Striking photos and videos have been making the rounds on social media in recent days, with people marveling over the appearance of pink ice in the Italian Alps.
The colored ice — known as “watermelon snow” — has been spotted at the Presena Glacier, a popular winter sports area in Italy’s northern Trentino region, which is already feeling the effects of climate change. The area has seen at least 15% of its glaciers retreat since the beginning of the century, and researchers are now looking into whether the proliferation of this natural phenomenon, caused by algae, could speed up the melting process even further.
The pink ice is caused by a naturally occurring algae, common to snowy regions around the world
Key facts
Even if we act swiftly to curb carbon emissions in the coming decades, more than a third of the world’s remaining glaciers are expected to disappear by the end of the century
Glaciers in the European Alps have shrunk by about half since 1900, according to the European Environment Agency. Climate scientists have warned the Alps could be ice free by 2100 if nothing is done to curb CO2 emissions
Algal bloom — more commonly associated with the world’s oceans — also darkens the surface of glaciers, increasing the amount of sun they absorb and, therefore, how quickly they melt
The algae found in Italy, likely Chlamydomonas nivalis, are quite common in the Alps and snowy regions around the world, according to Biagio Di Mauro of Italy’s National Research Council
Algae found in the Alps remain dormant during the winter, and only begin to spread on the ice in the spring and summer months when conditions are ideal: increased light and nutrients, plenty of meltwater and a temperature slightly above freezing.
It turns shades of pink and red when exposed to sunlight, which causes it to produce a naturally protective red carotene layer to shield it from harmful ultraviolet radiation.
Di Mauro says the ice, darkened by the algae, absorbs the sun’s rays and melts faster, eating away at the glacier
Chlamydomonas nivalis, which exhibits its red coloring in the closeup, uses pollutants carried in snow as food
But it doesn’t just give snow the look of strawberry gelato. Algal bloom can also tint ice shades of brown, violet yellow or green, as seen in a recent survey that analyzed the slushy coastal regions of Antarctica where warmer temperatures and the excrement of marine animals and birds cause it to spread.
Initial reports suggested the algae might be Ancylonema nordenskioeldii, a species common on the ice sheet in southwest Greenland. In a paper published earlier this year, Di Mauro wrote about his discovery of the first signs of this algae at the Morteratsch Glacier in Switzerland.
“Warm summers and dry winters create the perfect environment for the algae to grow. So, in the future the presence of algae on snow and ice could be favored by climate change,” Di Mauro told DW, though he said that remained to be proven.
Di Mauro said it was still unclear how the algae had made its way to the Alps from Greenland, or whether it had already spread elsewhere. But, he added, “I would not be surprised to find it on other glaciers in the Alps.”
Algae doesn’t just color ice red
Algae ‘spectacular,’ but not glaciers’ main threat
No matter the color, the algae don’t help the already endangered glaciers. The bright, white surface of a typical glacier generally has a high albedo, meaning it reflects around 80% of the sun’s radiation back into the atmosphere. But as the algae spread over the surface of the glacier, it darkens the ice and causes it to absorb more solar radiation, heating the glacier and speeding up the melting process.
This isn’t a new problem for glaciers, though. Matthias Huss, a glaciology professor at ETH Zurich, told DW in an email that organic material, dust and combustion residue — soot and ash — can accumulate on glaciers over time and “significantly” reduce their ability to reflect the sun’s rays.
Huss doesn’t think the pink algae will affect “glacier retreat significantly.” He said that while the pink algae are “very spectacular,” they only last for a relatively short time and aren’t very widespread in the Alps. He believes it’s possible that algae may contribute to a slight additional reduction in ice volume by the end of the century, but said more research was necessary.
Some ski resorts have begun covering their slopes with insulating tarps in the summer, preserving up to 70% of the snow
On a large scale, however, this would be too expensive and could cause more environmental damage
The main cause of glacial melt, however, continues to be climate change. In a 2019 study published by the European Geosciences Union (EGU), Huss said that if nothing is done to curb global CO2 emissions “the Alps will be mostly ice free by 2100, with only isolated ice patches remaining at high elevation, representing 5% or less of the present-day ice volume.”
The study, co-authored by Huss, Harry Zekollari of the Delft University of Technology and Daniel Farinotti of ETH Zurich, used computer models to examine ice flow and melt processes. It showed that glaciers in the Alps were already on track to lose about 50% of their total volume by mid-century, no matter what happens with emissions. Algae growth did not factor into their projections.
‘Alps are Europe’s water tower’
Ice fields are an integral part of the Alpine ecosystem and economy, as they attract tourists and “act as natural fresh water reservoirs” for agriculture and hydroelectricity, said the EGU study.
“The Alps are Europe’s water tower,” said Huss. “If the glaciers begin to provide less water during the summer, this could become problematic in periods of drought.” However, he said, given that the glaciers aren’t expected to disappear completely before the end of the century, in the worst-case scenario they will likely provide enough water for decades to come.
According to Zekollari, it might be possible to save “approximately one-third of the present-day [glacial] volume by the end of the century,” if the world follows CO2 curbs on par with the 2015 Paris climate agreement.
But he said the signs weren’t very positive at the moment, with the US abandoning the Paris accord and the EU still stuck in discussions of how it will reach its “ambitious goals.”
“It is clear that our actions today and decisions we make in the near future will have a large effect on the evolution of glaciers in the second part of the 21st century,” said Zekollari.
The fate of glaciers around the world
Death of a glacier
Iceland paid tribute to its Okjokull ice sheet on Sunday, holding a funeral for the first glacier lost to climate change. Known as ‘Ok’ for short, Okjokull lost its status as a glacier in 2014. At Sunday’s ceremony, mourners unveiled a plaque announcing that all the country’s main glaciers are expected to follow the same path in the next 200 years.
The fate of glaciers around the world
Antarctica: Huge glacier, huge risk
The Thwaites Glacier, part of the West Antarctic ice sheet, is believed to pose the greatest risk to rising sea levels in the future. If it collapses and flows into the sea, it could trigger a 50 cm sea level rise, a NASA-funded study found earlier this year. Antarctica is home to 50 times more ice than all the world’s mountain glaciers combined.
The fate of glaciers around the world
Patagonian beauty melting
Chile’s Grey Glacier is in the Patagonian Icefields, which account for the largest expanse of ice in the southern hemisphere outside of Antarctica. Researchers are closely monitoring the melt in the region, as it could help them understand how other glaciers, such as those in Antarctica and Greenland, could look in warmer climates of the future.
The fate of glaciers around the world
Alpine ice wrapped up for summer
The Rhone Glacier in Switzerland is the source of the river Rhone. For several years, scientists have been covering its ice with UV-resistant white blankets during summer, in an attempt to slow the melting. Researchers say our warming climate could eradicate two thirds of the ice in Alpine glaciers by the end of this century.
The fate of glaciers around the world
New Zealand: From hiking to helicopter
Franz Josef Glacier in New Zealand’s South Island is a popular tourist destination. The glacier used to follow a cyclical pattern of advance and retreat. But since 2008, Franz Josef has been rapidly shrinking. Guides used to be able to lead tourists straight onto the glacier by foot. Now, the only way they can get there is to fly in by helicopter.
The fate of glaciers around the world
African ice disappearing
Glaciers on Mount Kilimanjaro are also at risk. Back in 2012, NASA-supported researchers estimated what is left of the ice on Africa’s highest mountain would be gone by 2020. Kilimanjaro is a top attraction for tourists in Tanzania, and a crucial generator of revenue in a country where the majority of people live below the poverty line.
The fate of glaciers around the world
Melting dangerously
The US state of Alaska is home to thousands of glaciers. Some of them are melting 100 times faster than scientists previously thought, a 2019 study found. Earlier this month, two Germans and an Austrian were found dead after going kayaking on Valdez Glacier Lake. Officials say the tourists were likely killed by falling glacial ice.
The fate of glaciers around the world
Greenland’s Jakobshavn: Growth is not enough
Jakobshaven, Greenland’s largest glacier, is actually growing, a NASA study revealed earlier this year. But while one edge of the glacier has thickened slightly since 2016, the overall ice sheet is still melting rapidly, far outweighing expansion. Scientists believe the growth is due to an influx of unusually cold water from the north Atlantic – but they expect warmer waters will soon return.
More than 40 trillion gallons of rain drenched the Southeast United States in the last week from Hurricane Helene and a run-of-the-mill rainstorm that sloshed in ahead of it — an unheard of amount of water that has stunned experts.
That’s enough to fill the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium 51,000 times, or Lake Tahoe just once. If it was concentrated just on the state of North Carolina that much water would be 3.5 feet deep (more than 1 meter). It’s enough to fill more than 60 million Olympic-size swimming pools.
“That’s an astronomical amount of precipitation,” said Ed Clark, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. “I have not seen something in my 25 years of working at the weather service that is this geographically large of an extent and the sheer volume of water that fell from the sky.”
The flood damage from the rain is apocalyptic, meteorologists said. More than 100 people are dead, according to officials.
Private meteorologist Ryan Maue, a former NOAA chief scientist, calculated the amount of rain, using precipitation measurements made in 2.5-mile-by-2.5 mile grids as measured by satellites and ground observations. He came up with 40 trillion gallons through Sunday for the eastern United States, with 20 trillion gallons of that hitting just Georgia, Tennessee, the Carolinas and Florida from Hurricane Helene.
Clark did the calculations independently and said the 40 trillion gallon figure (151 trillion liters) is about right and, if anything, conservative. Maue said maybe 1 to 2 trillion more gallons of rain had fallen, much if it in Virginia, since his calculations.
Clark, who spends much of his work on issues of shrinking western water supplies, said to put the amount of rain in perspective, it’s more than twice the combined amount of water stored by two key Colorado River basin reservoirs: Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
Several meteorologists said this was a combination of two, maybe three storm systems. Before Helene struck, rain had fallen heavily for days because a low pressure system had “cut off” from the jet stream — which moves weather systems along west to east — and stalled over the Southeast. That funneled plenty of warm water from the Gulf of Mexico. And a storm that fell just short of named status parked along North Carolina’s Atlantic coast, dumping as much as 20 inches of rain, said North Carolina state climatologist Kathie Dello.
Then add Helene, one of the largest storms in the last couple decades and one that held plenty of rain because it was young and moved fast before it hit the Appalachians, said University of Albany hurricane expert Kristen Corbosiero.
“It was not just a perfect storm, but it was a combination of multiple storms that that led to the enormous amount of rain,” Maue said. “That collected at high elevation, we’re talking 3,000 to 6000 feet. And when you drop trillions of gallons on a mountain, that has to go down.”
The fact that these storms hit the mountains made everything worse, and not just because of runoff. The interaction between the mountains and the storm systems wrings more moisture out of the air, Clark, Maue and Corbosiero said.
North Carolina weather officials said their top measurement total was 31.33 inches in the tiny town of Busick. Mount Mitchell also got more than 2 feet of rainfall.
Before 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, “I said to our colleagues, you know, I never thought in my career that we would measure rainfall in feet,” Clark said. “And after Harvey, Florence, the more isolated events in eastern Kentucky, portions of South Dakota. We’re seeing events year in and year out where we are measuring rainfall in feet.”
Storms are getting wetter as the climate change s, said Corbosiero and Dello. A basic law of physics says the air holds nearly 4% more moisture for every degree Fahrenheit warmer (7% for every degree Celsius) and the world has warmed more than 2 degrees (1.2 degrees Celsius) since pre-industrial times.
Corbosiero said meteorologists are vigorously debating how much of Helene is due to worsening climate change and how much is random.
For Dello, the “fingerprints of climate change” were clear.
“We’ve seen tropical storm impacts in western North Carolina. But these storms are wetter and these storms are warmer. And there would have been a time when a tropical storm would have been heading toward North Carolina and would have caused some rain and some damage, but not apocalyptic destruction. ”
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It’s a dinosaur that roamed Alberta’s badlands more than 70 million years ago, sporting a big, bumpy, bony head the size of a baby elephant.
On Wednesday, paleontologists near Grande Prairie pulled its 272-kilogram skull from the ground.
They call it “Big Sam.”
The adult Pachyrhinosaurus is the second plant-eating dinosaur to be unearthed from a dense bonebed belonging to a herd that died together on the edge of a valley that now sits 450 kilometres northwest of Edmonton.
It didn’t die alone.
“We have hundreds of juvenile bones in the bonebed, so we know that there are many babies and some adults among all of the big adults,” Emily Bamforth, a paleontologist with the nearby Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum, said in an interview on the way to the dig site.
She described the horned Pachyrhinosaurus as “the smaller, older cousin of the triceratops.”
“This species of dinosaur is endemic to the Grand Prairie area, so it’s found here and nowhere else in the world. They are … kind of about the size of an Indian elephant and a rhino,” she added.
The head alone, she said, is about the size of a baby elephant.
The discovery was a long time coming.
The bonebed was first discovered by a high school teacher out for a walk about 50 years ago. It took the teacher a decade to get anyone from southern Alberta to come to take a look.
“At the time, sort of in the ’70s and ’80s, paleontology in northern Alberta was virtually unknown,” said Bamforth.
When paleontogists eventually got to the site, Bamforth said, they learned “it’s actually one of the densest dinosaur bonebeds in North America.”
“It contains about 100 to 300 bones per square metre,” she said.
Paleontologists have been at the site sporadically ever since, combing through bones belonging to turtles, dinosaurs and lizards. Sixteen years ago, they discovered a large skull of an approximately 30-year-old Pachyrhinosaurus, which is now at the museum.
About a year ago, they found the second adult: Big Sam.
Bamforth said both dinosaurs are believed to have been the elders in the herd.
“Their distinguishing feature is that, instead of having a horn on their nose like a triceratops, they had this big, bony bump called a boss. And they have big, bony bumps over their eyes as well,” she said.
“It makes them look a little strange. It’s the one dinosaur that if you find it, it’s the only possible thing it can be.”
The genders of the two adults are unknown.
Bamforth said the extraction was difficult because Big Sam was intertwined in a cluster of about 300 other bones.
The skull was found upside down, “as if the animal was lying on its back,” but was well preserved, she said.
She said the excavation process involved putting plaster on the skull and wooden planks around if for stability. From there, it was lifted out — very carefully — with a crane, and was to be shipped on a trolley to the museum for study.
“I have extracted skulls in the past. This is probably the biggest one I’ve ever done though,” said Bamforth.
“It’s pretty exciting.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 25, 2024.
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A rare Bronze-Era jar accidentally smashed by a 4-year-old visiting a museum was back on display Wednesday after restoration experts were able to carefully piece the artifact back together.
Last month, a family from northern Israel was visiting the museum when their youngest son tipped over the jar, which smashed into pieces.
Alex Geller, the boy’s father, said his son — the youngest of three — is exceptionally curious, and that the moment he heard the crash, “please let that not be my child” was the first thought that raced through his head.
The jar has been on display at the Hecht Museum in Haifa for 35 years. It was one of the only containers of its size and from that period still complete when it was discovered.
The Bronze Age jar is one of many artifacts exhibited out in the open, part of the Hecht Museum’s vision of letting visitors explore history without glass barriers, said Inbal Rivlin, the director of the museum, which is associated with Haifa University in northern Israel.
It was likely used to hold wine or oil, and dates back to between 2200 and 1500 B.C.
Rivlin and the museum decided to turn the moment, which captured international attention, into a teaching moment, inviting the Geller family back for a special visit and hands-on activity to illustrate the restoration process.
Rivlin added that the incident provided a welcome distraction from the ongoing war in Gaza. “Well, he’s just a kid. So I think that somehow it touches the heart of the people in Israel and around the world,“ said Rivlin.
Roee Shafir, a restoration expert at the museum, said the repairs would be fairly simple, as the pieces were from a single, complete jar. Archaeologists often face the more daunting task of sifting through piles of shards from multiple objects and trying to piece them together.
Experts used 3D technology, hi-resolution videos, and special glue to painstakingly reconstruct the large jar.
Less than two weeks after it broke, the jar went back on display at the museum. The gluing process left small hairline cracks, and a few pieces are missing, but the jar’s impressive size remains.
The only noticeable difference in the exhibit was a new sign reading “please don’t touch.”
