The researchers lugged their equipment out onto the glacier. Scanning the surroundings, they found a good spot below an icefall and scraped away the top layer of snow. In went a drill as tall as a person. Reaching back through layers of snow and time, the team pulled up core after core of ancient ice.

With only three participants, this September research expedition to Georgia’s Gergeti glacier was a modest operation but one of considerable importance. The glaciers of the Caucasus mountains are melting at an astonishing rate, and those like Gergeti are ground zero for attempts to measure how climate change is fueling the process.

With the ice core samples, the international team of researchers hopes to better understand the so-called “climatic record” of the region – how changes in things like pollution levels are preserved in ice.

“Ideally, we want to know what happened in the past to understand what could happen in the future,” said Guram Imnadze, a PhD student at Ilia State University in Tbilisi and one of the researchers for the project.

The location for sample-taking was carefully selected: Gergeti represents a microcosm of changes occurring across the Greater Caucasus Range, a spine of mountains stretching from Russia’s Black Sea coast in the west to near the modern metropolis of Baku, Azerbaijan, in the east. Researchers have found that nowhere are the glaciers melting faster than in this eastern part of the range.

The Gergeti glacier used to snake into the rocky ravine below. But no longer. Between 1960-2014, the glacier retreated by almost a kilometer, according to a 2018 study. The retreat has continued in the years since the study was published, and the glacier is now “critically endangered,” according to Rice University’s Global Glacier Casualty List.

A recent United Nations report released ahead of the COP29 climate conference puts the melting into context: Caucasus glaciers have retreated by an average of 600 meters over the last century, releasing an estimated 11 billion tons of freshwater. Total glacial cover is now just a fraction of what it was a few hundred years ago.

The problem has left policymakers scrambling for solutions and researchers in a race against the clock to collect valuable scientific information stored in the ice before it disappears. 

“If there is no snow, glaciers cannot survive”

Projections for how glacial melting will play out in the coming years are alarming. According to scientists’ best estimates, the glaciers in the eastern Caucasus will be all but gone by the end of the century if there are no substantial changes made to curb global greenhouse gas emissions.

“The snow cover is getting low, snowfall is getting low. If there is no snow, glaciers cannot survive,” said Levan Tielidze, a leading Georgian glaciologist and the author of numerous regional glacial inventories. “The eastern Caucasus are drier, [they have a] more continental climate than the central and the western part.”

At COP29, the issue is getting some attention. One of Tielidze’s colleagues presented the group’s research on the future of glacial loss in the Caucasus. And in a report issued on the first day of the conference, the World Meteorological Organization said that 2024 is on track to be the hottest year on record.

What worries researchers like Tielidze is that the rate of melting is actually increasing over time, mirroring global trends. During the first half of the 20th century, he said, the rate of melting hovered around four-tenths of a percent annually, but the rate had almost tripled per year by the 2014-2020 period, according to the most recently available data.

“Almost 45 percent of ice cover was lost [during the last] 120 years,” Tielidze said. “This probably sounds like a long period for humans, but for geological time this is a very, very short period. And so just think about if we lost 45 percent of ice during the 120 years, what's going to happen in the next 100 years?”

The rate of melting is now comparable to the more well-studied European Alps, another area which is feeling the disastrous effects of glacial melting. There, officials and experts are having to come up with novel adaptation strategies to the consequences of glacial melting, including landslides, habitat loss, and water shortages.

Such threats exist in the Caucasus, too. The most striking example, for many Georgians, occurred last year.

On August 3, 2023, a landslide wiped away the mountainous resort town of Shovi in north-central Georgia. The disaster resulted in 33 deaths and widespread property damage. A hastily prepared preliminary report released by the government on August 7 stated what some may have instinctively known: that the incident was a direct result of climate change.

According to the government’s assessment, the triggering event was falling rock just a few kilometers up the valley from Shovi. The rock cleaved off a section of the Buba glacier, releasing a mass of built-up meltwater in what’s known as an “outburst flood.” It was as if a dam made of ice had been breached. The waters rushed into the village in less than 10 minutes.

In its new report, the UN notes that such incidents are likely to become increasingly common. The gradual accumulation of meltwater “creates a high probability of glacial lake outburst floods,” the organization said, adding that “[observations] show that the risk of such hazards will increase.” 

The UN called the Shovi disaster “a stark reminder of the escalating impact of climate change,” according to a statement released shortly after the landslide. Georgia’s government, meanwhile, has faced criticism, mainly for ignoring warnings that the area was vulnerable to geological hazards and that robust early warning systems could have saved lives.

“Similar events occur not only in Georgia but worldwide due to global warming,” said Irakli Megrelidze, an official in Georgia’s National Environmental Agency, after the landslide. “However, this does not mean that there is no danger because we have many glaciers. Climate change and global warming trigger similar processes.”

Another worry of those who study melting glaciers is that the process will reduce the freshwater supplies, causing far-reaching disruption to livelihoods and economic damage.

Less water trickling down from mountain streams feeding rivers means a worsening situation for agriculture and energy generation. In Georgia, hydropower is the leading energy source, with at least 80 percent coming from dams, according to the International Energy Agency. The country’s largest hydropower station, the Enguri Dam, is fed by streams descending mountains of the western Caucasus.

Experts say that the melting glaciers could also impact Georgia's tourism industry. “Let's imagine there are no glaciers in the Caucasus,” Tielidze, the glaciologist, said. “A significant number of tourists come to Georgia and the Caucasus to see mountains;” if the glaciers go away, he asserted, so too might tourist dollars. 

A race against time

Looming over the Gergeti glacier, often obscured by clouds, is Mt. Kazbegi, whose peak is over 5,000 meters above sea level. It is one of the tallest mountains in the Caucasus and a notable waypoint on the boundary between Georgia and Russia. By a strange feature of geopolitics, in order to make the multi-day ascent, it’s necessary to cross, briefly, from one country into the other.

Such is the nature of life in these mountains, where trying to better understand the effects of climate change is an interdisciplinary, multinational endeavor. For the Ilia State University researchers, funding is scant and the conditions challenging: scientific instruments, for instance, need to be flown in from abroad.

“You cannot even dream about, I don't know, [deep] ice core drilling or hiring a helicopter,” said Mikheil Elashvili, a professor at IliaState University working on the glacier research project, describing the lack of funding opportunities available in Georgia. “The helicopter will take the entire budget of the year.”

A few days after the expedition to the Gergeti glacier, the ice core samples were sitting in insulated Styrofoam containers on a flight back to the United States. Georgia doesn’t have the necessary laboratory equipment to analyze them, so samples need to be sent out of the country. In this case, they are now at University of Maine’s Climate Change Institute, one of the partnering organizations on the project.

The team plans to use these samples for a preliminary analysis of the region’s climatic record. The September expedition was, in a way, a proof-of-concept exercise, and the hope is that with their initial findings they will be able to secure funding to conduct a wider, publishable assessment involving deeper ice core drilling.

But that process could take months or even years. In the meantime, Imnadze and the research team know that each passing day means more precious data is melting away.

“It is very necessary and … important to retrieve and extract these records as fast as we can, because they might not be there [in the future].” It’s a race against time, he said, “and we are losing it.”