View of the iconic snow cone in the vast Snow Volcano Hall inside Schwarzmooskogel ice cave, located on the western edge of the Totes Gebirge mountain range in Austria. This fantastic feature has built up over many hundreds of years through the yearly accumulation of snow that falls in from the surface.
Mountain regions respond sensitively to climate change. Taking advantage of Alpine caves, a team of scientists led by Swiss Paleoclimatologist Dr. Marc Luetscher from the Swiss Institute for Speleology and Karst Studies (SISKA), is working to understand how permafrost has evolved through time. Ice caves form through a combination of snow intrusion and/or congelation of water infiltrating a karst system. Often up to several centuries old, the climate record of this ice remains largely under-studied. Today we are also able to tell if a cave was an ice cave in the past. This is achieved by looking for cryogenic cave calcites. These form when water enters a cave, and freezes and turns to ice. In this process, the water becomes progressively enriched in ions to the point that it becomes super-saturated and precipitates calcite.