Abstract ID: 28.7304 | Accepted as Talk | Talk/Oral | 2025-02-28 11:30 - 11:45 | Ágnes‐Heller‐Haus/Small Lecture Room

In a groundbreaking experiment conducted on August 10, 1928, Paul Louis Mercanton and his team deposited artillery shells, akin to time capsules, on the accumulation zone of the Rhône Glacier. This bold initiative aimed to provide future glaciologists with physical markers to study the glacier’s long-term flow dynamics. These “messages in a glacier,” as Mercanton described them, were expected to journey slowly through the ice, eventually emerging decades or even centuries later, offering unique insights into subglacial motion and ice deformation. When reporting his experiment, Mercanton estimated that the shells would “reappear between 2110 and 2170” at the glacier’s tongue. Nearly a century later, rapid glacier retreat driven by climate change raises intriguing questions that modern simulation techniques are uniquely poised to address: Where are Mercanton’s shells now? When will they reappear on the glacier’s surface? How accurate were Mercanton’s initial predictions? This work revisits Mercanton’s visionary experiment in light of modern ice flow modeling. Combining historical insights with the glacier evolution model IGM, we explore hypothesis about the fate of these buried artifacts and the evolving dynamics of the Rhône Glacier under different climate trajectories, and assess the estimate of Mercanton given his unawareness of climate warming.