Normally, he heads for this trail on the massive Morteratsch glacier in late September, at the end of the summer melting season in the Alps. But exceptionally high ice loss this year brought him to this 15 square kilometer (six square mile) ice amphitheater two months early for emergency maintenance work. The measuring poles he uses to track changes in pack depth are at risk of being completely removed as the ice melts and new holes must be drilled. Alpine glaciers are on track for the biggest mass losses in at least 60 years of record-keeping, according to data released exclusively to Reuters. By looking at the difference in how much snow falls in the winter and how much ice melts in the summer, scientists can measure how much a glacier has shrunk in any given year. Since last winter, which brought relatively little snowfall, the Alps have been hit by two major early summer heatwaves, including one in July that saw temperatures close to 30C in the Swiss mountain village of Zermatt. During this heat wave, the elevation at which the water froze was measured at a record high of 5,184 meters (17,000 ft)—an elevation higher than Mont Blanc—compared to the normal summer level of 3,000–3,500 meters. “It’s really obvious that this is an extreme season,” Linsbauer said, shouting over the roar of the rushing meltwater as he checked the height of a pole sticking out of the ice. Most of the world’s mountain glaciers are retreating due to climate change. But those in the European Alps are particularly vulnerable because they are smaller, with relatively little ice cover. Meanwhile, temperatures in the Alps are rising by around 0.3 degrees Celsius per decade – twice as fast as the global average. Hikers on the Pers Glacier If greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, Alpine glaciers are expected to lose more than 80% of their current mass by 2100. Many will disappear no matter what action is taken now, thanks to global warming caused by past emissions , according to the 2019 Report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Already, Morteratsch has changed a lot since the glacier depicted on tourist maps of the area. The long tongue that once reached deep into the valley below has shrunk by nearly two miles, while the depth of snow and ice has thinned to as much as 200 meters. The smaller Pers glacier flowed through it until 2017, when it retreated so much that it broke off. However, glaciologists still often group them with the Morteratsch Complex. The dire situation this year raises concerns that the Alps’ glaciers may disappear sooner than expected. With more years like 2022, this could happen, said Matthias Huss, who heads Glacier Monitoring in Switzerland (GLAMOSGlamos). “We’re seeing model effects that were expected a few decades into the future happening now,” Huss said. “I didn’t expect to see such an extreme year so early in the century.” Glaciers in Austria, France and Italy confirmed that glaciers there were on track for record losses. In Austria “the glaciers are without snow right up to the summits,” said Andrea Fischer, a glaciologist at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Seasonal snowfall, in addition to replenishing the ice lost during the summer, protects the glaciers from further melting by providing a white covering that reflects sunlight back into the atmosphere better than the darker ice—contaminated by dust or pollution. But on the Grand Etret glacier in northwestern Italy, only 1.3 meters of snow accumulated last winter – 2 meters less than the annual average for the 20 years to 2020. This year’s Alpine ice losses, recorded even before the biggest melting month of August, surprised scientists to some extent, as many of the glaciers had already lost their lower snouts. Because they had retreated to the mountain, where temperatures are cooler, scientists thought they should have been better protected. “You can easily imagine that the end results after the summer will be the widespread loss of glacier cover in the Italian Alps,” said Marco Giardino, vice president of the Italian glaciation commission. Data shared exclusively with Reuters shows that Morteratsch is now losing around 5cm a day and is already in worse shape than it would normally be at the end of an average summer, according to data from Glamos and the Université libre de Bruxelles. The nearby Silvretta Glacier has lost about a meter more than at the same point in 1947 – the worst year in its database which stretches back to 1915.
