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The
one-two punch for Swiss glaciers during the country's third
hottest summer on record means they lost as much ice in two
years as in the three decades before 1990, it said, describing
the losses as "catastrophic".
"This year was very problematic for glaciers because there was
really little snow in winter, and the summer was very warm,"
Matthias Huss, who leads Glacier Monitoring Switzerland (GLAMOS),
told Reuters.
"The combination of these two factors is the worst that can
happen to glaciers."
More than half of the glaciers in the Alps are in Switzerland
where temperatures are rising by around twice the global average
due to climate change.
This year, low winter snowfall combined with an early start and
a late end to the summer melt season dealt the heavy losses,
GLAMOS said.
In the peak melt month of August, the Swiss weather service said
the elevation at which precipitation freezes hit a new record
overnight high, measured at 5,289 meters (17,350 ft), an
altitude higher than Mont Blanc's summit. This exceeded last
year's record of 5,184 meters.
Pictures posted by Huss on social media during data collection
trips in recent weeks showed for the first time on record new
lakes forming next to glacier tongues, streams of melt water
running through ice caves, and bare rock poking out from
thinning ice. In some places, bodies lost long ago have been
recovered as ice sheets have shrunk.
"We are really losing the small glaciers," Huss said. "The
remnant ice is becoming covered by rocks and debris, regions
that have been snow and ice covered over the last decades and
centuries are becoming just black slopes that are dangerous
because of rockfall."
In some places, GLAMOS had to cease monitoring due to the melt.
"We have closed down one of our monitoring programs on a small
glacier in central Switzerland because it just became too
dangerous to measure," Huss said. "It became very small and
therefore unrepresentative."
Swiss records go back to at least 1960 and as far back as 1914
for some glaciers.
(Writing by Emma Farge; editing by Timothy Gardner)
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