Lakes and Ice in the Pyrenees: the lost memory of water

The remoteness of the Ordesa y Monte Perdido National Park, the long distance from large urban and industrial centers and the recent environmental protection legislation do not completely prevent that human activities affect its natural environments, including both biotic and abiotic elements. Among the abiotic elements stand out for its uniqueness the cryosphere water and ice systems, such as the Monte Perdido glacier, which has lost more than one third of its surface area in the last quarter of a century; the famous cave of Casteret, whose masses of perennial ice are undergoing a drastic reduction; and the ibón or lake of Marboré, whose limnological processes and thermal regime could also suffer rapid changes in the near future.
The rapid speed of these changes, coupled with the small size of these water-ice systems put them at risk of losing their functionality in a few decades. To understand their evolution, a continuous monitoring is required, even more as they are disappearing archives and if we fail to collect the data today, we will not be able to take them in the future.