Alpine glaciers vanishing at record rate in scorching summer

From the way 45-year-old Swiss glaciologist Andreas Linsbauer bounds over icy crevasses, you would never guess he was carrying 10kg of steel equipment needed to chart the decline of Switzerland’s glaciers.

Normally, he heads down this path on the massive Morteratsch Glacier in late September, the end of the summer melt season in the Alps. But exceptionally high ice loss this year has brought him to this 15sq-km amphitheatre of ice two months early for emergency maintenance work.

The measuring poles he uses to track changes in the depth of the pack are at risk of dislodging entirely as the ice melts away and he needs to drill new holes.

The Alps’ glaciers are on track for their highest mass losses in at least 60 years of record keeping, data shared with Reuters shows. By looking at the difference in how much snow fell in winter, and how much ice melts in the summer, scientists can measure how much a glacier has shrunk in any given year.

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Since last winter, which brought relatively little snowfall, the Alps have sweltered through two big early summer heatwaves — including one in July marked by temperatures near 30 degrees in the Swiss mountain village of Zermatt.

During this heatwave, the elevation at which water froze was measured at a record high of 5,184m (17,000ft) — at an altitude higher than Mont Blanc’s — compared with the normal summer level of 3,000m-3,500m.

“It’s really obvious that this is an extreme season,” Linsbauer said, shouting over the roar of rushing meltwater as he checked the height of a pole jutting out of the ice.

Most of the world’s mountain glaciers — remnants of the last ice age — are retreating due to climate change. But those in the European Alps are especially vulnerable because they are smaller with relatively little ice cover. Meanwhile, temperatures in the Alps are warming at about 0.3 degrees per decade — around twice as fast as the global average.

If greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, the Alps glaciers are expected to lose more than 80 per cent of their current mass by 2100. Many will disappear regardless of whatever emissions action is taken now, thanks to global warming baked in by past emissions, according to a 2019 report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Already, Morteratsch is much changed from the glacier depicted on the region’s tourist maps. The long tongue that once reached deep into the valley below has shrunk back by nearly 3km, while the depth of the snow and ice pack has thinned by up to 200m (656ft). A parallel glacier Pers flowed into it until 2017 but has now receded so much that an expanding strip of grit lies between them.

The dire situation this year raises concern that the Alps’ glaciers might vanish sooner than expected. With more years like 2022, that could happen, said Matthias Huss, who leads Glacier Monitoring Switzerland (Glamos).

“We are seeing model results expected a few decades in the future are happening now,” Huss said. “I did not expect to see such an extreme year so early in the century.”

This year's Alpine ice losses, registered even before the biggest melt month of August, surprised scientists to some extent, as many of the glaciers had already lost their lower-lying snouts. Because they had retreated up the mountain, where temperatures are cooler, scientists thought they should have been better protected.

Data shows that Morteratsch is now shedding about 5cm a day and is already in a worse state than it would normally be at the end of an average summer, according to data from Glamos and the Universite libre de Bruxelles.

The nearby Silvretta Glacier has lost about 1m more than at the same point in 1947 — the worst year in its database stretching back to 1915.

Above the Swiss village of Saas Fee, a path leading to a mountain hut once passed through a summer snowfield on top of the Chessjen Glacier.

“It's too dangerous now,” due to the risk of falling rocks, once held together by hard-frozen ice, said hutkeeper Dario Andenmatten while gazing out over a barren landscape dotted with glacial lakes. Nearby, the rumble of stones tumbling from the mountain could be heard.

Swiss residents worry that the glacier losses will hurt their economy. Some area ski resorts of the Alps, which rely on these glaciers, now cover them with white sheets to reflect sunlight and reduce melting.

Swiss glaciers feature in many of the country’s fairy tales, and the Aletsch Glacier is considered a Unesco World Heritage Site. Losing the glaciers “means losing our national heritage, our identity,” said hiker Bernardin Chavaillaz. “It’s sad.” — Reuters