CAVE ICE CORING IN THE GEŢARUL FOCUL VIU (ROMANIA): TECHNIQUES, PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS ON CORE STRATIGRAPHY AND RADIOCARBON AGES SETTING A NEW RECORD FOR THIS CAVE.

In the Geţarul Focul Viu ice cave an 8.27 m long ice core has been drilled during May, 2004. The drilling was part of an Italian-Romanian project on the glaciology and hypogean climatology of this ice cave, located in the Padis area (Apuseni Mounts, Transilvania, Romania). The Geţarul Focul Viu is the second largest ice cave in Romania and it hosts an ice block composed of layered ice; on one side the nearly vertical ice wall is not in contact with the rock, allowing direct observation of the ice layering. During wintertime snow entering from the partially collapsed vault accumulates forming a snow cone which only partially melts during the hypogean melting season. In the more distal parts from the snow feed, bare ice is exposed to ablation and shallow water ponds develop, which refreeze during the following season. Several scattered tree logs and various organic remains can be observed to partially protrude both from the top and the side of the ice block. The ice core was drilled by an electrically powered light corer and the drilling was deepened down to the bedrock or to a large stone. The core, sealed in plastic bags and kept cool by refrigerated transport back to the cold laboratory at the University of Milano Bicocca, is being sampled for δ 18 O, δD, tritium, ionic content, pollen anaysis, and thin sections will be cut for detail textural and crystal fabric analysis. Several organic samples (wood chips, branches, leaves) were separated during sample preparation and three of them have been dated by AMS radiocarbon technique. The uncalibrated ages are: 800 ± 30 BP (leaf, found at -3.80 m) , 860 ± 30 BP (leaf, -5.11 m) and 1790 ± 30 BP (wood chips, - 6.86 m). In a different ice core drilled in this cave a wood sample from the depth of – 6.67 m was found to date 850 ± 50 BP and a branch sampled on the side ice wall at – 11.1 m had an uncalibrated age of 1230 ± 40 BP (Kern et al., 2004). The implication of these findings are outlined in the present work.