Glaciers are vanishing at a record rate in the Alps following heat waves
From the way 45-year-old Swiss glaciologist Andreas Linsbauer bounds over icy crevasses, you would never guess he was carrying 10 kg of steel equipment needed to chart the decline of Switzerland's glaciers.
The Alps' glaciers are on track for their highest mass losses in at least 60 years of record keeping, data shared exclusively with Reuters shows. By looking at the difference in how much snow fell in winter, and how much ice melts in the summer, scientists can measure how much a glacier has shrunk in any given year.
If greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, the Alps glaciers are expected to lose more than 80 per cent 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 aAlready, Morteratsch is much changed from the glacier depicted on the region's tourist maps.
Seasonal snowfall, apart from replenishing ice lost during summer, protects glaciers from further melt by providing a white cover that reflects sunlight back out to atmosphere better than darker ice – sullied by dust or pollution - can do. "You can easily imagine the final results after summer will be … extensive loss of glacier coverage in the Italian Alps," said Marco Giardino, vice-president of the Italian Glaciological Committee.
An early June expedition in India’s Himachal Pradesh found that the Chhota Shigri Glacier had lost much of its snow cover. "The highest temperature in over a century in March through May clearly had its impacts," said glaciologist Mohd Farooq Azam at the Indian Institute of Technology Indore.Vanishing glaciers are already endangering lives and livelihoods. Earlier this month, a glacier collapse on the Marmolada in Italy killed 11 people.
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