14 August, 2015 – Man may have altered the climate long before the Industrial Revolution, already with fires started three thousand years ago in European forests to make room for settlements, and fields for cultivation and breeding. This is the thesis defended in a study of the University Ca ‘Foscari of Venice and the Institute for the Dynamics of Environmental Processes of the National Research Council (CNR-IDPA) on the Greenland ice sheet. These ice sheets are real environmental archives of climatic history that were analyzed in the clean room of Ca ‘Foscari in two European projects coordinated by Carlo Barbante, director of IDPA-CNR and professor of Analytical Chemistry at the University. The findings were published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. “We found a peak in the flow of combustion levels of vegetation between 3500 and 2500 years ago unparalleled in the past 110,000 years,” explains Piero Zennaro, IDPA-CNR researcher and Ca’ Foscari University and co-author of the study, “It’s difficult to explain just by natural climatic factors, and only a strong human contribution seems to explain this ‘abnormal’ performance recorded in the Greenland ice sheet. ” The hypothesis has been confirmed by the climate models. “There is a strong inflammatory activity in simulations that take into account man-made variables, such as population density and per capita cultivated land – specifies Zennaro – Numerous independent reconstructions of fires, possible thanks to data on charcoal and pollen collected in Europe, show a peak coinciding with that found in the ice sheets in Greenland.” The study is part of the European research projects “Early Human Impact” and “4 Future Past”, the first of which is funded by the European Research Council. (Red)
