Research Activities

ClimADA:  the objective is to reconstruct the climatic evolution of the last few centuries, the anthropic impact in the high Alpine mountain area, and also the dynamics of the plant species, the history of the great fires which have occurred in the last centuries and in general of the anthropic impacts in the high mountain. A 224m depth ice core is drilled on the Pian di Neve Adamello glacier.

EAIIST: The scientific objectives of EAIIST are to study the icy terrain of the Antarctic continent in its driest places. These areas are largely unexplored and unknowns and offer unique and extraordinary morphological characteristics suspected to be analog of glacial conditions. This international consortium of scientists is built around the idea to explore and study by the means of ground vehicles the geophysical (snow physics, surface mass balance, density, temperature, seismicity, etc.), geochemical (impurities, aerosols, air-snow transfer, water isotopes, etc.) and meteorological dimensions (AWS, atmospheric dynamic, air mass transport, etc.) of these most inhospitable and remote place on Earth nevertheless so important for the functioning of the climatic machinery of the Earth's climate.

OPTICE: it's a scientific multidisciplinary project aimed at determining and studying the optical properties of dust in the snowpack and ice cores and the optical properties of ice and snow crystals. The research activity is driven by people having different backgrounds and experiences and we belive that multidisciplinary studies are essentials for the comprehension of the complex climate systems and the cryosphere. Through the use of videos, documents, interviews, conferences and meetings in schools we think it’s possible to transmit adequate notions on the cryosphere and climate change as well as raise public awareness before ice and snow will be only a memory in the Alps.

RICE: it is an international collaboration between New Zealand, USA, Denmark, United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, Italy and China. The project was successful in recovering a 763 m deep ice core to bedrock from Roosevelt Island in Antarctica to determine the stability of the Ross Ice Shelf and West Antarctica in a warming world.

TALDICE: The TALos Dome Ice CorE is a European ice core research project (Italy, France, Germany, Switzerland, United Kingdom) aimed at retrieving an ice core reaching back through the previous two interglacials (about 250,000 years), from a peripheral dome of East Antarctica. 

GV7: Improved understanding of climate variability over the last two millennia - that is a critical time period for inves- tigating natural and anthropogenic climate change – is one of the key priorities of the International Partnership in Ice Core Sciences (IPICS).

Technological Activities

HyICE: The Hyperspectral ICE-core scanner is a novel instrument for collecting high-resolution hyperspectral measurements of ice-core samples. The system consists of a custom-designed high-precision linear motion stage which embeds a HeadWall Hyperspec(R) visible to near-infrared imaging sensor and a dedicated halogen light source.    

PADI: The italian Platform for the Analysis of mineral Dust in Ice cores is the first Continuous Flow Analysis (CFA) system dedicated to the mineral dust and particles in ice cores in Italy and it aims to be a reference system for particulate analysis in ice and snow cores.