45-year-old Swiss glaciologist Andreas Linsbauer was carrying 10 kg of steel equipment required to monitor the melting of Switzerland’s glaciers from the way he bounds over icy crevasses.
He typically travels this route on the enormous Morteratsch Glacier in late September, at the conclusion of the Alps’ summer melt season. But this year’s unusually high ice loss forced him to arrive two months early for urgent maintenance on this 15.8 square mile (5.8 square kilometer) ice amphitheatre.
He needs to drill new holes because the measuring poles he uses to monitor changes in the depth of the pack are in danger of completely falling out as the ice melts away.
According to data provided only to the media, the glaciers of the Alps are expected to experience their highest mass losses in at least 60 years of record keeping. Scientists can determine how much a glacier has decreased in any particular year by comparing the difference between how much ice melts in the summer and how much snow falls in the winter.
Since the comparatively mild winter of last year, the Alps have had two intense early summer heatwaves, with one in July bringing temperatures as high as 30 Celsius (86 Fahrenheit) to the Swiss alpine resort of Zermatt.
In contrast to the average summer level of between 3,000 and 3,500 meters, during this heatwave the elevation at which water froze was observed at a record high of 5,184 meters (17,000 feet) – at an altitude higher than Mont Blanc’s (9,800-11,500 feet).
Linsbauer checked the height of a pole sticking out of the ice and shouted over the roar of gushing meltwater, “It’s really evident that this is an extraordinary season.”
Climate change is causing the majority of mountain glaciers, which are left over from the last ice age, to retreat. But because they are smaller and have less ice cover, those in the European Alps are particularly at risk. At roughly twice the rate of the world average, the Alps are warming at a rate of about 0.3C every decade.
By 2100, it is predicted that the Alps glaciers will have lost more than 80% of their current mass if greenhouse gas emissions continue to climb. According to a 2019 report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, many will vanish regardless of the emissions measures implemented now because global warming is already present as a result of past emissions.
The Morteratsch glacier is already very different from how it appears on traveler’s maps of the area. The lengthy tongue that originally extended over 3 kilometers (2 miles) into the valley below has receded while the thickness of the snow and ice pack has decreased by up to 200 meters (656 feet). Up until 2017, the parallel glacier Pers flowed into it, but it has since retreated so far that a growing grit strip now separates the two.
The bleak scenario this year prompts worry that the glaciers of the Alps may disappear earlier than anticipated. That might occur with more years like 2022, according to Matthias Huss, director of Glacier Monitoring Switzerland.
Huss stated, “We are witnessing model results anticipated a few decades in the future are happening today. Seeing such an extraordinary year so early in the century was not what I had anticipated.
Glaciologists in Austria, France, and Italy who spoke with the media verified that the countries’ glaciers were headed for record-breaking losses. According to glaciologist Andrea Fischer of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, “the glaciers are snow-free up to the summits” in Austria.
In addition to restoring the ice lost over the summer, seasonal snowfall shields glaciers from further melting by providing a white surface that reflects sunlight back out to the atmosphere more effectively than darker ice that has been tarnished by dust or pollution.
However, only 1.3 meters (4.2 feet) of snow has collected in the Grand Etret glacier in northwest Italy over the course of this past winter, which is 2 meters (6.6 feet) less than the annual average for the 20 years leading up to 2020.
Since several of the glaciers had previously lost their lower-lying snouts, the scientists were rather taken aback by the Alpine ice losses this year, which were observed even before August, when there was the greatest amount of melting. Scientists believed that they should have been better protected because they had retreated up the mountain, where temperatures are cooler.
The severe loss of glacier coverage in the Italian Alps will be the end outcome, according to Marco Giardino, deputy president of the Italian Glaciological Committee.
According to statistics from GLAMOS and the Universite libre de Bruxelles that was only shared with the media, Morteratsch is currently losing roughly 5 centimeters (2 inches) of snow per day and is already in worse shape than it would typically be at the end of an average summer.
In comparison to 1947, the worst year in its database dating back to 1915, the neighboring Silvretta Glacier has lost around 1 meter (3.3 feet) more weight.
