With the start of the analyses aimed at reconstructing the climatic and environmental conditions of the central part of the Alps over the last 1000 years, ClimADA – the second phase of the project which in April 2021 allowed the extraction of 224 meters of ice from the Adamello Glacier, thanks to an operation that has never been successful before in the entire Alpine arc – officially begins.
While the extracted ice is kept at the EuroCOLD Lab of the University of Milan-Bicocca, the collection of data from the fiber optic cables installed inside the extraction hole continued: from their installation allows to measure displacement and temperature along the entire extraction hole, giving valuable information to understand how the Adamello Glacier moves and what its future will be.
The insertion of 4 fiber optic cables inside the perforation – designed and executed by the team of Prof. Mario Martinelli from the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering of the Politecnico di Milano – made it possible to monitor the temporal evolution of the thermal and deformation profile of the glacier up to a depth of 225 meters, with high spatial detail.
This kind of monitoring system has never been applied to an alpine glacier before and it will provide essential information, which will be useful to geologists and glaciologists to predict the future evolution of the largest and deepest glacier in Italy. The data collected through the fiber optic sensor will subsequently be integrated with satellite data, to follow the surface displacement of the glacier. The integration of these data will allow to estimate the parameters of the thermo-fluid dynamic model developed by the University of Brescia and therefore to obtain a more reliable description of the glacier capable of simulating its behavior.
The project, coordinated by Fondazione Lombardia per l’Ambiente with the contribution of Fondazione Cariplo and the support of Edison and Bayer, sees the collaboration of Regione Lombardia, Università di Milano-Bicocca, Politecnico di Milano and Comunità Montana di Valle Camonica-Parco dell’Adamello.
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