One more season & new data

Summer season 2018, indeed quite stormy in the southeastern Alps this year, is rapidly running and once the abundant snow of the last winter largely melted, we started with our routine fieldworks. Temperature dataloggers have been downloaded, pollen traps recovered, photogrammetric campaign started and several other new activities are going to be planned in the next weeks and months.

Honestly, we were thinking that the last colder winter would have brought positive news in terms of ice caves health, but unfortunately we found a rather worse situation.

No frozen speleothemes still surviving, no ice on the rock wall and already a lot of water over the topographic surface of the ice bodies, with several supraglacial streams forming here and there. This is really not promising because if it is true that the late-July-to-early-August period generally represents the summer peak, in the ice caves the ablation season will last long and the "ice cave summer" is generally represented by the month of September and partly October.

Keep going to be updated here to know all about the news from the C3 project

(In the picture, downloading some temperature dataloggers below an ice deposit in the Canin massif few days ago - photo RRC)