Swiss glaciers lose 10% of volume in worst two years on record
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The Rhone glacier in Obergoms, Switzerland, on Sept 26, 2023.
PHOTO: REUTERS
ZURICH – Switzerland's glaciers suffered their second-worst melt rate this year after record 2022 losses, shrinking their overall volume by 10 per cent in the last two years, monitoring body Glamos said on Thursday.
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,” Dr 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.
In 2023, 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 5,289m, an altitude higher than Mont Blanc’s summit. This exceeded 2022’s record of 5,184m.
Pictures posted by Dr 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,” Dr 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.”
Visitors walk in a fleece covered ice cave, amid climate change, inside the Rhone glacier in Obergoms, Switzerland, on Sept 26, 2023.
PHOTO: REUTERS
In some places, Glamos had to cease monitoring due to the melt.
“We have closed down one of our monitoring programmes on a small glacier in central Switzerland because it just became too dangerous to measure,” Dr 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. REUTERS
