Caucasus

Launched towards the end of July 2011, the second expedition of the “On the Trail of the Glaciers” project took place on the Georgian side of the Greater Caucuses. The team travelled through the virtually uncontaminated and unexplored slopes of North-west Georgia, with their characteristic Caucasian peaks, ranging from 3,000 to 5,000 meters in height.

The main aim of the project was to re-shoot archive photographs from exactly the same viewpoint and to evaluate the surface area covered by local glaciers by means of geomorphological surveys and by gauging the melting speed of local glaciers through the installation of ablatometric stakes to ascertain the relation between detritus laying on the surface of the ice, the rate of melting of the ice and the reflective power (albedo) of surface areas. I invited researchers Kenneth Hewitt and Riccardo Scotti to join the expedition and we were filmed by a TV crew consisting of director Marco Preti and cameraman Luca Venchiarutti, who made the documentary of the expedition produced by SD Cinematografica.

These are the scientific results of the expedition.