The theme of the climate emergency is at the center of important research activities, promoted among others by Italian scientists and researchers considered among the leading international experts. These include Professor Carlo Barbante, director of the Institute of Polar Sciences at the CNR and full professor at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, as well as leader of the Ice Memory project for the collection and protection of the “memory of the ice”. An international project that sees protagonists, a network of researchers distributed between Europe, Asia and North America, engaged in campaigns to collect ice samples in various glacial areas of the planet, before global warming determines their melting and therefore the disappearance of the valuable information contained in them.
Since last November, however, a new mission has begun for Professor Barbante with destination Antartide, the international Concordia base, where together with a pool of Italian and French researchers he will work for about two months on analysis activities on polar ice samples taken from the “construction site” Little Dome C. The objective of the mission called Beyond Epica, of which Barbante is the coordinator, is grandiose: to reconstruct the climatic history of the planet over the last million and a half years.
Because to imagine the future it is always important to know the past; this is why Barbante and the other researchers are dedicating all their experience to reconstructing the various passages that determined the evolution of the climate on earth, also with the aim of warning us about the many damages caused by man’s action on terrestrial ecosystem in the last 200 years alone, to the point of altering the fundamental balances on which the very existence of life on our planet is based.
The story of the mission is documented through a blog managed by Barbante himself, which will be echoed in the coming weeks by a large space of information on the communication channels managed by AKU and various editorial contributions on the main sector publications in the outdoor world.
