Ice Caves in Romania

Perşoiu, Aurel; Onac, Bogdan P.

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-90747-5_52

Cited by 6 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…2a) is located in the Western Carpathian Mountains (Romania), at 1165 m a.s.l. The cave opens to the surface through a ∼ 60 m wide, 47 m deep shaft which continues with a wide chamber that hosts one of the largest (> 100 000 m 3 ) and oldest (> 10 500 years) underground glaciers in the world (Perşoiu et al, 2017;Perşoiu and Onac, 2019). This ice body primarily formed by freezing of liquid water every early winter, adding a layer of up to 20 cm of newly formed ice to the existing ice body each year.…”

Section: Glaciers In Central and Southeastern Europementioning

confidence: 99%

Record summer rains in 2019 led to massive loss of surface and cave ice in SE Europe

et al. 2021

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Abstract. Glaciers worldwide are shrinking at an accelerated rate as the climate changes in response to anthropogenic influence. While increasing air temperature is the main factor behind glacier mass and volume loss, variable patterns of precipitation distribution also play a role, though these are not as well understood. Furthermore, while the response of surface glaciers (from large polar ice sheets to small alpine glaciers) to climatic changes is well documented and continuously monitored, little to nothing is known about how cave glaciers (perennial ice accumulations in rock-hosted caves) react to atmospheric warming. In this context, we present here the response of cave and surface glaciers in SE Europe to the extreme precipitation events occurring between May and July 2019 in SE Europe. Surface glaciers in the northern Balkan Peninsula lost between 17 % and 19 % of their total area, while cave glaciers in Croatia, Greece, Romania and Slovenia lost ice at levels higher than any recorded by instrumental observations during the past decades. The melting was likely the result of large amounts of warm water delivered directly to the surface of the glaciers, leading to rapid reduction in the area of surface glaciers and the thickness of cave glaciers. As climate models predict that such extreme precipitation events are set to increase in frequency and intensity, the presence of cave glaciers in SE Europe and the paleoclimatic information they host may be lost in the near future. Moreover, the same projected continuous warming and increase in precipitation extremes could pose an additional threat to the alpine glaciers in southern Europe, resulting in faster-than-predicted melting.

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Section: Glaciers In Central and Southeastern Europementioning

confidence: 99%

Record summer rains in 2019 led to massive loss of surface and cave ice in SE Europe

et al. 2021

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“…Focul Viu Ice Cave (FV, 107 m long, ~30 m deep) is located in the Central Bihor Mountains, Romania (46.27º N;22.68º E, 1165 m above sea level, Fig. 1a, Perșoiu andOnac, 2019). The cave has a simple morphology (Fig.…”

Section: Site Informationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Below the opening and covering the entire surface of the Great Hall, a layered ice block developed, with an estimated thickness of 20 m and minimum volume of 30,000 m 3 (Orghidan et al, 1984;Brad et al, 2018). The descendent morphology of the cave and the presence of the two openings determine a specific air circulation (Perșoiu and Onac, 2019), with cold air inflow through the lower entrance and warm air outflow through the upper one in winter, and slow convective circulation within the cave 30 (with no air mass exchange with the exterior) during summer. As a consequence of this circulation, the cave has a specific climate, with negative temperatures following the external ones between October and April, and stable ones at 0 C between May and September, when ice melts and absorbs the heat transferred to the cave's atmosphere by conduction through the air and rock.…”

Section: Site Informationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The maximum age of the ice is 1026 cal BP at 4.45 m below surface (based on direct dating of organic remains) and 1099 cal BP at 4.86 m below surface (extrapolation). A rock embedded in the ice at 4.87 m below the surface stopped the drilling effort, but previous work in the cave has shown that the thickness of the ice block 15 exceeds 15 m (Orghidan et al, 1984;Kern et al, 2004;Perșoiu and Onac, 2019).…”

Section: Ice Accummulation In Focul Viu Ice Cavementioning

confidence: 99%

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Stable isotopes in cave ice suggest summer temperatures in East-Central Europe are linked to AMO variability

Bădăluţă

Perşoiu

Ionita

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Abstract. The climate of East-Central Europe (ECE) is the result of the combination of influences originating in the wider North Atlantic realm, the Mediterranean Sea and Western Asia/Siberia. Climate models suggest that these competing influences will result in difficult to predict responses to the ongoing climatic changes, thus making mitigation and adaptation strategies challenging to devise and implement. Previous studies have shown that the complex interplay between the large-scale atmospheric patterns across the region result in strongly dissimilar summer and winter conditions on time scales ranging from decades to millennia. To put these into a wider context, long term climate reconstructions are required, but, largely due to historical reasons, these are lacking in ECE. We address these issues by presenting a high resolution, precisely dated record of summer temperature variations during the last millennium in ECE, based on stable isotopic analysis performed on a 4.84 m long ice core extracted from Focul Viu Ice Cave (Western Carpathians, Romania). The data shows little summer temperature differences between the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age on centennial scales, but with well-expressed minima and maxima occurred synchronously with periods of low and high solar activity. Further, summer temperatures fluctuated with a periodicity similar to that of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, suggesting that solar variability-induced climatic changes were transferred locally by atmospheric processes. Contrary to summer temperatures, winter ones show stronger contrast between the MWP and LIA, thus suggesting that the later were likely an expression of winter climatic conditions.

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Ice in caves

Perşoiu

Onac

2019

Encyclopedia of Caves

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Ice Caves in Romania

Cited by 6 publications

References 13 publications

Record summer rains in 2019 led to massive loss of surface and cave ice in SE Europe

Record summer rains in 2019 led to massive loss of surface and cave ice in SE Europe

Stable isotopes in cave ice suggest summer temperatures in East-Central Europe are linked to AMO variability

Ice in caves

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