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Tree Find Confirms Alps Warming at Twice Global Rate
Tree Find Confirms Alps Warming at Twice Global Rate | Climate Central
This is solid evidence that within Europe it hasn't been warmer. Tell me how a needle and a ice man could remain preserved if NOT?
Tree Find Confirms Alps Warming at Twice Global Rate | Climate Central
LONDON It was only a single, withered conifer needle, but it told a dramatic story of climate change. Glaciologists found it in a set of ice cores drilled through a glacier on top of Mount Ortles, in the Italian Alps.
It lay about 80 meters (262 feet) below the glacial surface, encased in solid ice, and carbon dating confirmed that it had blown from the branches of Larix decidua, the European larch, 2,600 years earlier.
It was found about 30 kilometers (19 miles) from a far more dramatic exposure: the body of Ötzi the Iceman, a mummified Bronze Age corpse revealed by a melting glacier in 1991.
Both finds deliver the same uncompromising message: for at least 5,000 years because Ötzi perished around that time the Italian Alps had continued to stay frozen throughout the year.
As they drilled into the glacier, the research scientists from six nations found that the first 30 meter (98 feet) layer was composed of grainy compacted snow that had partly melted. Below that was nothing but solid, enduring ice all the way down to frozen bedrock.
They could be sure that nothing had changed in this permanent layer of ice for at least 2,600 years, because it had preserved a larch needle from a tree that must have grown at least 2,000 years after Ötzi had perished in the same complex of Alpine glaciers.
The leaf supports the idea that prehistoric ice is still present at the highest elevations of the region, Gabrielli said.
This is solid evidence that within Europe it hasn't been warmer. Tell me how a needle and a ice man could remain preserved if NOT?