• Two highly shared photos on social networks claim to show the retreat of a glacier in recent decades.

  • If the dates mentioned on the publication are incorrect, the two pictures, taken in Norway, are "the perfect illustration of the retreat of the glaciers,"

    Denis Mercier, professor of physical geography at the Sorbonne

    , explains to

    20 Minutes

    .

Spectacular images, witnesses of the retreat of glaciers on our planet.

A black-and-white photo showing a man in a rowboat in front of a glacier is regularly shared on social media, compared to a color photo, showing the same glacier in retreat.

The location where the photo is taken is not indicated.

The images were reportedly taken in 1960 and 2020, but those dates are wrong. 

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The black and white photo is not fifty years old.

It is much older: it dates from 1918. It comes from the collections of the Norwegian Polar Institute.

The second photo, in color, was taken in 2002 by Swedish photographer Christian Åslund, as part of a Greenpeace campaign aimed at raising awareness about the retreat of glaciers.

Both photos show the Blomstrandbreen Glacier, located in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, east of Greenland and north of Norway.

They are "the perfect illustration of the retreat of glaciers linked to global warming that we have observed in the Arctic since the end of the 19th century, the beginning of the 20th century", summarizes

Denis Mercier, a scientist who goes

to

20 Minutes

to

20 Minutes.

the region since 1993.

The temperature has risen by three degrees in a century.

The retreat of this glacier is at least a kilometer and a half, recalls the professor of physical geography at Sorbonne University.

If it is also visible, it is also because “the Blomstrandbreen is a glacier with a sea front, as we can see in the first photo, the oldest.

You have an ice cliff that ends in the sea, in the waters of the fjord, and the cliff is 40 to 50 m high.

The figure on his boat is still far from the front when the photograph was taken.

"

Along with Kronebreen, another glacier located at the bottom of the fjord, Blomstrandbreen is "one of the fastest receding glaciers in Svalbard".

This region "is warming two to three times faster than the global average".

The temperature has risen there by three degrees in a century. 

Another consequence of this warming, the disappearance of the pack ice in winter around these glaciers, recalls Denis Mercier.

What is causing this warming?

The researcher points to two phenomena: "The end of the Little Ice Age", whose end dates back to the middle of the 19th century, and "the additional greenhouse effect linked to anthropogenic warming, in particular the use of fossil fuels and the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere ”. 

The approximately 220,000 glaciers on the planet have lost 4% of their mass in twenty years, according to a study published in April in the journal

Nature

. 

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