Secrets of the climate 
hitherto known as eco-tourism destinations, natural treasures, carved deep in shapes dreams, visions unusual routes. Now it turns out that in the nooks and passages of complex karst has also written the future of nature. In the drop that falls from the ceiling of the tunnels dug into the heart of the mountains is the key to the secrets of the Earth. In the trickle of calcite stalactites and stalagmites that generates a cryptic map that can reveal the past and the future of our climate. He discovered a group of international research co-ordinated by a team of scholars of the 'University of Pisa. Since 1998, finding and analyzing stalagmites and stalactites of dell'Antro Corchia, one of the most complex karst largest in Europe. Partly open to the public in 2001, the 60 km of the cave is thrown into the belly of one of the most impressive of the Versilia by massive erosion thousands of years are best known as one of the wonders of the underground tourist Tuscany. Or as the corollary of one of the largest museum of mining marble in Italy.
"For some months we do know that the caves are a natural evolution of the planet recorder," says Giovanni Zanchetta, the Pisan scientist leading the team: "The Alps of Tuscany has been the orographic barrier to all Atlantic circulation to the entire geological ages and consequently has become a great reservoir of information, natural kind of hard disk full of valuable data, including those relating to 'last century, characterized more by human factors, ie by human intervention over nature "continues paleoclimatologists. In a few microns, in the drop of water, calcium, uranium and carbon that resonates in the belly of Corchia for centuries, scholars have discovered a veritable archive of environmental changes of the last million years. "Thanks to investigations on chemical and physical concretions and the observation of the level of decay of uranium, compared to the amount of oxygen and carbon in calcareous sediments, we were able to determine with precision the date of the major weather phenomena that have hit the Atlantic area. Now, for example, we know what were the crucial steps in recent years 950mila. It is already understood that the penultimate glacial period is over 140 thousand years ago, much earlier than projected in the last 70 years by scholars, going back the event with 10 thousand years late. But the discovery of truly unexpected departure to the place of the heat wave which led to the end. The phase of dissolution was triggered in the southern hemisphere, not far north as we believed. "
The research was published in September in the journal Science
, the most authoritative source of information for scientists in the international community. The work of the team led by Zanchetta are still ongoing. Other disturbances, temperature variations, movement of the crust, large periods of rainfall or morphological change of the territory will be dated and identified by the study. "In addition, our work could revolutionize the history of paleoclimatology. This research, besides being less expensive and invasive drilling and coring of the polar ice caps and bottoms of the oceans, give better results. While marine or lacustrine sediments can not be dated beyond the limit of carbon 14, with the stalactites we can go back much further and with great accuracy. And the peculiarity of Corchia is that of maintaining a pure environment, untouched, a prerequisite to get reliable results. " Not only that. The harvest of data gathered by the research group will be useful to better understand what might happen in the future. "Apply the information that comes from Corchia mathematical models with which today we draw projections on future climate changes," says Russel Drysdale, a scholar involved in the project by the University of Newcastle, Australia. "The unknown and the spectrum of all is global warming, which in reality is a cyclical phenomenon - continues the researcher - but that human activity, with CO2 emissions, is accelerating. Well, our simulations, thanks to Corchia could reveal when and what to expect. "
Article by Mario
Blacks published
-Florence Republic (25/11/2009)
