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GRUNDER, SCHMIDLI, MATTER
Thanks to a spectacular rescue operation, the pilot and all eleven occupants survived. But the American machine has disappeared since the accident, only a few debris reappeared a few years ago.
A team of researchers from ETH and the University of Zurich, together with the Spiez Laboratory and the Swiss Army, found that the glacier will soon release even more parts of the wreck using radioactive material in ice samples.
70 years after the “Dakota” accident: Glacier releases aircraft debris due to heat(01:00)
Nuclear weapons tests conducted by the United States and Russia in the 1950s and 1960s left radioactive traces in the glacial ice. These debris allow scientists to date the ice and reconstruct the glacier flow.
Using a computer model, the ETH researchers calculated where soldiers had to drill into the glacier to extract ice from the Cold War era. While the researchers didn’t hit the right spots with their predictions for the first drilling campaign, they were successful in the second campaign in the summer of 2019, according to ETH Zurich.
The soldiers took almost half a ton of ice from the glacier at a total of 200 points, which were then examined for radioactive elements. “In the drilling cores of the second campaign, the two main peaks of contamination with radioactive substances of 1957 and 1962 are clearly visible, before the contamination abruptly breaks after 1963,” said Guillaume Jouve of ETH and the University of Zurich.
The data allowed the researchers to refine their flow model for the Gauli Glacier. According to this, the ice masses are moving downhill faster than previously thought, as reported by the specialized magazine “The Cryosphere”.
Y: The data makes the hearts of many glacier archaeologists beat faster. Because the team concluded that most of the Dakota remains near the previous finds will likely reappear sooner than expected.
