Glacier Subfossil Wood

Sampling campaign for subfossil wood of glacial origin in the Alps

Help me collect the latest subfossil glacial woods!

As we are seeing today with glacial collapse around the world, glaciers are the most visible indicators of climate change. Less well known, trees can tell similar stories, with even finer temporal resolution (annual)!

The intersection of the two constitutes a unique field of research called ’dendroglaciology,’ which studies periods when glacier fronts interacted with forests in the past. It is interesting to note that dendroglaciology shares much with ’preventive archaeology’ in terms of working under urgent conditions!

This project goes far beyond the academic world and aims to build up a sufficiently large corpus of wood to be used in the future for analyses that we do not yet know how to carry out. Subfossil wood allows us to reconstruct pre-industrial temperatures with unparalleled resolution. Our work is therefore in line with projects such as ICE MEMORY, in which glaciologists recover ice cores to preserve and study them in the future, when the glaciers have disappeared!

My project is unique because we are the only team in the Alps capable of collecting and accurately dating these unique pieces of evidence of past climates, which are very ephemeral and will no longer be found in the future.

Recovering these samples – which constitute a formidable archive of the past – can only be done during a short period of the year (at the end of summer) and, above all, during a fairly short period of ’deglaciation’ (a few decades)!

Then, it is TOO LATE!

These glacial subfossil trees began to be discovered in the 1970s, but it is only since the 2000s that they have been the subject of more in-depth studies. Unfortunately, this window of opportunity for their discovery will soon close, as we approach the Holocene glacial minimum. Due to the rapid evolution of proglacial margins under the effect of global warming, moraines are disappearing and stabilising at an increasingly rapid rate. In this context, missing a year of sampling means that all samples appearing that season in areas that are still ’geomorphologically active’ will be lost forever, as they will quickly be exported downstream and buried by alluvial or slope deposits.

I have been doing this work in the Alps for 16 years. Most of the time (9 of those 16 years), I have funded the annual field inspections with my own funds, mainly because they were not part of any ongoing project (or because I was not employed in research).

This is what we call passion and dedication.

But this year, I don’t have the funds necessary to carry out the sampling season.

These pieces of wood are our fragile heritage.

With your help, I will be able to make these last witnesses of past climates speak!

This is what I need backing for.

Concretely, the money will be used for :

• 20 days fieldwork session in the Alps : travel, accomodation, chainsaw gear.
• Radiocarbon dating of 10 wood samples (not datable by dendrochronology).
• Preparation of proposed counter-proposals for this project (photographs, wood samples).
• The use of the money will be explained and the account/results of the fieldwork will be published this autumn.