Climatology on thin ice

摘要

When Margit Schwikowski hiked up a glacier on the Svalbard islands in the Arctic Ocean a few years ago to collect ice samples for her climate research, she was gob-smacked. The Swiss analytical chemist had been to this site in 1997 to drill a core to test for trace gases and aerosols in her lab at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Villigen. But when she returned in 2009 for fresh samples, she could no longer reach the site: the warming glacier had cracked open and developed a yawning crevasse. "You cannot go there," she says today. She has not tried to return since. It would be pointless, in any case - the crack had let in fresh snowfall and melt water, which then mixed with ice deeper in the glacier and confused any data that a scientist might try to extract.