For centuries, this spectacular underworld recorded the local climate and entranced visitors. Now its fairy-tale features are receding, drip by drip
had a magical playground. From her home in the quaint Austrian village of Sankt Martin bei Lofer, near Salzburg, she’d hike past a little pilgrimage church and up into the Lofer Mountains, just below the tree line where even hardy larches cease to grow. At an altitude of about 5,200 feet, under the lofty peaks, she’d slip through a narrow portal in the limestone and crawl right inside the mountain. Prax ice cave, she says, was just like a fairy tale.
When that temperature is cold enough, water dripping into the cave freezes into mesmerizing, ever changing shapes. Icicles many feet long or wide festoon the ceiling. Thick ice sheets cascade down the walls. On the floor, the slow drip can gradually build ice cones several floors high or enormous rinks that seal off entire shafts. In some caves the oldest ice dates back thousands of years.
In Scărişoara Cave in Romania’s Apuseni Mountains, Persoiu has been climbing down a 150-foot-deep shaft to reach a perennial ice block with a surface the size of seven basketball courts. Carbon-dating bat guano or plant matter trapped inside the ice tells him when it grew or retreated, as the climate cooled or warmed. He has drilled 80 feet into the block without reaching the bottom, and the oldest ice samples he has taken were more than 10,000 years old.
Years ago, when Racine, a Frenchman, enrolled as a freshman at Imperial College London, he was compelled by the friendly faces at a booth promoting the caving club to join an expedition to a 20-mile-long cave in Wales. He almost got lost—and that’s what hooked him. “You might only be five meters from the entrance, but it feels like you’re in a different world, away from civilization,” he says. Cavers joke that their hobby is the poor man’s space exploration.
Along the rock wall, Racine and Snowling spot a gap where the melting ice has pulled away from the wall, creating a small shaft that leads closer to the bottom of the ice block, and deeper in time. The two squeeze down, chest against rock, back against ice, and disappear. An hour later, when they pull themselves back up on ice axes and ropes, they have fresh material to analyze.Please be respectful of copyright. Unauthorized use is prohibited.
Much of this scientific information is doomed; the scientists’ resources are limited, the ice caves many, and the melt rate rapid. Glaciologists already are planning to transport cores from the Alps’ glaciers to Antarctica where, Persoiu says, at least for the foreseeable future, “nothing can go that wrong to melt all the ice.” For cave ice, too, researchers are hoping to store samples somewhere safe, to preserve them for future generations to study.Please be respectful of copyright.
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