Switzerland: Disastrous Melt Rate of Glaciers Recorded
According to a 2019 report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the melting of ice and snow is one of the 10 key threats from climate change. The report also indicates that if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, by 2100, the Alps will lose 80% of their current mass.
The heavy snow melt has also led to multiple unexpected situations in which hikers in the Alps are regularly discovering bodies that were encased in the snow for decades or even centuries.
Archaeologists are now suddenly able to access and study objects that were buried far too deep inside the snow.
Apart from this, the melting of a glacier between Italy and Switzerland has moved the border that ran along the watershed. This has forced the two countries into a lengthy diplomatic negotiation.
Across the Alps, the heavy snow melt has risked dislodging measuring poles that record important data. Scientists have been forced to do emergency repair work at many sites across the mountains.
Switzerland Records Worst Melt Rate of its Glaciers
Switzerland records worst melt rate of its glaciers:
[...] The loss of ice melt was the most "dramatic" for small glaciers, the report said.
The Pizol, Vadret dal Corvatsch and Schwarzbachfirn glaciers "have practically disappeared, measurements were discontinued", the commission said.
In the Engadine and southern Valais regions, both in the south, "a four to six-metre-thick (13-20 foot) layer of ice at 3,000 metres (9,843 feet) above sea level vanished", said the report.
Significant losses were recorded even at the very highest measuring points, including the Jungfraujoch mountain, which peaks at nearly 3,500 metres (11,483 feet).
[...] If greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, the Alps' glaciers are expected to lose more than 80 percent 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.
"Reversing the process is almost impossible. It would take a massive and persistent cooling of the atmosphere," Huss told Al Jazeera.
"However, strong and global-scale reduction in greenhouse gas emissions would help to stabilize the climate in a few decades," he added.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Friday September 30 2022, @12:13PM (4 children)
As usual, it is ignored that we're not burning fossil fuels and such because we don't like Alpen glaciers. We're doing important stuff with that activity - like elevating billions of people out of poverty and powering the world. Good thing, right?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bradley13 on Friday September 30 2022, @12:46PM (1 child)
For what it's worth, we had a very warm summer. Glaciers have been retreating here for 200 years - ever since the Little Ice Age. The melt rate this year was higher than before.
Let's set global warming to the side for a moment. Why is the disappearance of a glacier bad? Glaciers are dead - nothing grows there. After they disappear, you have a valley, and life.
My fellow Swiss would be angry, but the only reason to regret the loss of glaciers is because they are part of the traditional scenery. People don't like to see things change. Then we have to add global warming back in: the loss of glaciers is, in fact, a sign of warming. But again, they've been melting for 200 years. The role of AGW is a separate debate.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday October 01 2022, @03:46AM
Some years back there was a sign erected at Glacier National Park to the effect of "this here famous glacier will be gone within SmallNumber Years!"
A few years later the sign was quietly disappeared... because the glacier in question was growing.
Several glaciers in Greenland and Alaska are exhibiting the same embarrassing behavior.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Phoenix666 on Friday September 30 2022, @03:15PM
Indeed. 13,000 years ago Lake Missoula [wikipedia.org] covered a huge swath of Montana, and the ice sheets covered quite a bit of other states [montananaturalist.org], too.
Should we be sad that the ice melted and Lake Missoula drained out through eastern Washington and Oregon? Is it a terrible thing that Chicago and New York aren't buried under a mile of glacier [wikipedia.org]?
In fact, I'm gonna go out on a limb and suggest that land that isn't buried under ice is a lot more amenable to human purposes than land that is. Animals and plants might enjoy it more, too.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Username on Friday September 30 2022, @04:49PM
It's so horrible, archeologists are making wonderful discoveries and people are having a good time. They should all be as miserable and offended as me.
(Score: 2, Troll) by Barenflimski on Friday September 30 2022, @01:38PM (1 child)
I wish there was a time when absolutely everything wasn't going to be disastrous or terrible or the end of the world. One would get the impression by reading today's news, that history never happened. It seems that it is just built into human nature to think these things. "It's different. We're all gonna die!!!"
Somehow, I feel the Swiss are going to persevere without the glacier. Their kids might even say something like, "Why were our parents so upset about the glacier? This is our favorite camping spot."
Times haven't changed much since chicken little or the Mayans.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Friday September 30 2022, @03:07PM
Newspapers, cable TV, and the infotainment industry that comprises both are dying, so it is natural for them to constantly cry that the world is ending. (No, it's not ending, it's changing...) It is also the only thing they have been able to think of to draw people's attention. That, though, will play out the same way the old story of The Boy Who Cried Wolf did. Eventually every last shred of their credibility will be gone and people will move on.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Friday September 30 2022, @05:55PM (5 children)
Glaciers are a reservoir of water. It arrives in the winter, and freezes onto the glacier. In the summer, it gradually releases water into rivers and into the atmosphere.
I don't know the role of the Swiss glaciers, but the ones in the mountains in western Canada provide the water that gives the agricultural land in the prairies the summer rains that make it productive.
Those glaciers are also retreating. Will we be hungry when they're gone?
-- hendrik
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 30 2022, @06:33PM (1 child)
OTOH, millions of acres of useless Canadian tundra will be able to support agriculture where it currently can't.
But, as others here have pointed out, the potential good news is completely ignored.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 01 2022, @03:49AM
For the Swiss people, it's still bad news, those Swiss cheeses don't grow in alpine deserts.
Me thinks they'll need to compensate, I guess one way is whatever drugs the Swiss pharma sells on American market is gonna jump in prices - you happy?
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday October 01 2022, @03:52AM (1 child)
Then you may find this ... encouraging:
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-study-mass-gains-of-antarctic-ice-sheet-greater-than-losses [nasa.gov]
https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2882/jakobshavn-glacier-grows-for-third-straight-year/ [nasa.gov]
https://www.earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/85900/the-advance-of-hubbard-glacier [nasa.gov]
Gee, I wonder if all that water hadn't gone into ice formation, we might have less drought.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Saturday October 01 2022, @10:15AM
A blip that happened in 2015
Since then,
* 2017 - calving of an iceberg 5,800 square kilometers (size of Delaware) [nasa.gov] from the Larsen ice shelf, with the a thickness about 350m
* 2021 iceberg of 4,320 square kilometres (slightly large than the island of Majorca) [phys.org] calves from Filchner–Ronne Ice Shelf (Western Antarctica)
* 2022 - ‘Doomsday glacier,’ which could raise sea level by several feet, is holding on ‘by its fingernails,’ scientists say [cnn.com]
Jakobshavn glacier drains just 7 percent of Greenland’s ice.
In fact, Antarctica loses ice at an average rate of 149 Gt/year and Greenland at 273 Gt/year since 2002 [nasa.gov].
Seems like the extra 420Gt/year of water doesn't help you with your drought at all.
Have a nice cherry picking ahead.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday October 01 2022, @01:14PM
Of course not. Next.