Alpine glaciers are not only stunning aspects of the alpine environment, but they also serve as valuable natural records of Earth's climate history. Tiny particles like pollen, soot, and metals are preserved within their ice layers, allowing scientists to recreate historical environmental conditions and discriminate between natural climate fluctuations and the effects of human activities. A research published in the scientific journal Frontiers in Earth Science examined a ten-meter-long ice core collected in 2019 from Cima del Lago Bianco, around 3,500 meters above sea level. This sample preserved climatic records extending back up to 6,000 years, allowing us a thorough reconstruction of environmental changes spanning millennia. Each ice layer contains particles deposited by the atmosphere throughout time, revealing both climate changes and previous human activities. One of the most intriguing discoveries of the study is the occurrence of peaks in arsenic, lead, copper, and silver beginning in 950 AD. According to Azzurra Spagnesi of Ca' Foscari University in Venice, these signals correspond to periods of high mining and metallurgical activity in medieval Europe. Metals released into the atmosphere during extraction and processing were transported by winds and deposited as particles in glaciers. But the most concerning result is the rate at which these glaciers are melting. At the point where the ice core was extracted in 2019, the glacier today has a thickness of just over five metres. This means that much of this millennia-old climate archive has already been destroyed as ice melts at a rapid pace. The extinction of Alpine glaciers thus represents a double loss: not only of ecosystems critical to the environmental balance and water resources of mountain regions, but also of a natural memory that retains thousands of years of our planet's climate history.