Lombardywinter 2021/2022
Mariotti Mauro
The technicians of the Pontedilegno-Tonale Consortium have removed the 100 thousand square meters from the Presena Glacier. of geotextile sheets that protect the ice from the sun's rays in the hottest months. Checking the conditions of the snow layer preserved thanks to the cover will soon be planned.
Monday 27 September 2021 4 minutes reading time
The action that has just ended on the Presena Glacier is repeated autumn after autumn. A well-established custom, which has been going on since 2008. Dozens of technicians and workers from the Carosello company, a plant engineering company that is part of the Pontedilegno-Tonale Consortium, have unstitched the threads that held together the large geotextile sheets that they covered since last June, such as a huge sunshade, the snowy layer. The wisdom of tailoring, combined with the most innovative technology, to achieve an ambitious goal: to protect ice from sunlight and reduce its melting (technically we speak of "ablation").
Now it's up to the glaciologists of the Muse (the Science Museum of Trento) to evaluate the condition of the glacier to see the results achieved and how much snow was lost anyway with the summer melt. Measurements made in April verified that winter accumulation had brought the snow thickness to four meters.
Moreover, last winter, even though the ski resorts were closed due to the pandemic, ten snow cannons with an hourly range of 220 cubic meters were still fired on the glacier to increase and consolidate the snow layer.
«The Presena is one of the wonders that nature has given to our territory. A true heritage of humanity. This is why we want to do our part to preserve it and make it to be admired for a long time by residents and tourists "explains Davide Panizza, president of the Pontedilegno-Tonale Consortium. The economic commitment, for the Carosello company, is certainly not marginal: 420 thousand euros of investment, for a "blanket" of sheets which, year after year, has increased by 250% to exceed 100 thousand square meters. The sector covered with the geotextile showed average albedo values (the unit of measurement of the reflectivity of a surface) of 0.64 against an average value of 0.43 for the rest of the glacial surface. The covered sector on average has an absorption of solar energy of 36% while the uncovered surface has absorbed 57% of the solar energy.
Overall, the action of the sheet in modulating the radiative energy flows absorbed by the glacier leads, for the experimentation period, to a 52% reduction in ablation. This summer, the sheets made it possible to save 2 m of ice, in line with the trend of recent years.
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Settembre 2021 - Presena toglie la copertura - ph. credit: Mariotti Mauro
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