Melting Glaciers: The Dying of the Ice Giants

The Mer de Glace, the banded tongue of ice below Mont Blanc, continues to melt and may soon lose its distinctive shape.

The Death of the Ice Giants

By ANDREAS FREY and BERNHARD EDMAIER (photos)

The Mer de Glace, the banded tongue of ice below Mont Blanc, continues to melt and may soon lose its distinctive shape.

September 15, 2022 · The glaciers of the Alps are melting more than ever, leaving gray peaks behind.

The disappearing ice leads to new dangers.

Can the glaciers still be saved?

Fiesch in the Swiss Valais is an enchanting alpine village.

Numerous mountain tours start at the foot of the Alpine peaks, one of which leads to the largest glacier in the Alps, the Great Aletsch.

But the ascent to the majestic ice stream is not child's play, accidents happen again and again.

In the spring, a ski tourer died when she fell into a crevasse.

And the danger in the high Alps is increasing.

The Aletsch thaws – and retreats.

The melt has never been as drastic as in this crazy weather year.

Fissures open up in the battered ice, eating deeper and further in, exposing bare rock.

Where the compact ice once cut deep into the mountain, steep mountain flanks remain, from which rubble and rock can thunder down to the valley at any time.

Crumbling mountains are another danger that alpinists face.

The people of Fiesch know this, so they pray every year against falling rocks and storms.

In 1678, the residents even took a vow to live virtuously in order to prevent the threatening advance of the Aletsch Glacier.

From 1862, at the height of the Little Ice Age, believers held a procession in hopes of halting the rapid advance of the glacier.

The prayers, one could say, have been answered: in the past few decades, the Aletsch has been retreating at a rapid pace.

But since it became apparent that the glacier was disappearing more and more, the petition was simply turned around: for twelve years, the residents of Fiesch have been suing for the glacier to grow again.

The Great Aletsch is the largest glacier in the Alps.

Due to climate change, the ice flow has lost 200 meters in thickness in some places since 1850.

The Valais Alps with the ice-free Matterhorn can be seen on the horizon.

But the Aletsch is no longer growing.

He melts.

The melt has accelerated in recent years.

When Matthias Huss made an unscheduled visit to the Aletsch at the beginning of July, the glaciologist from ETH Zurich was able to see the shrinkage from afar.

The wide stream of ice looked bare, the winter's snow cover had already disappeared, the sun slammed directly onto the ice.

In addition, debris from the mountain flanks collected on this and additionally accelerated the melt.

Huss heads the Swiss glacier measurement network Glamos.

The ice giants of Switzerland have been measuring this program and that of the previous organization using similar methods for 140 years.

For fifteen years, Huss has been climbing selected Swiss mountains twice a year to measure the glaciers.

He usually goes out with his team at the end of winter and summer to investigate the condition of the ice giants.

To do this, the researchers drill measuring rods meters deep into the ice at certain points on the glacier in the autumn.

If the year was very hot, a year later they stick out like candles from a cake.

From the position, the glaciologist can then see how much ice has thawed in the summer and how the mass balance of an ice sheet has changed.

And this mass balance has been consistently negative since the 1980s.

The snowfalls in winter no longer compensate for the melt in summer.

In a recent study in the journal 

, in which Matthias Huss is also involved, Swiss researchers are reconstructing 20th-century glacier retreat.

The sad finding: Between 1931 and 2016, the volume of the Swiss ice giants halved.

Much more ice is likely to have disappeared by now.

This summer, some of the poles were sticking out of the ice as early as June, and the strong melt threatened the measurement.

If the researchers had waited until September, as is usual, the poles would have simply fallen over.

As a result, Huss' team had to climb the glaciers as early as June to sink the poles even deeper into the ice.

The glaciologist actually knows the Swiss glaciers better than almost anyone else.

But this summer he didn't recognize her.

He is no stranger to the sight of battered masses of ice: Matthias Huss has seen dozens of melting glaciers and experienced numerous extreme years in the Alps, but none was as disastrous as 2022, he says.

"That was the first summer I was really concerned."

"We've measured melting rates that I didn't think were possible."

Matthias Huss, glaciologist

It's like the Aletsch almost everywhere in the Alps.

Many glaciers had lost their layer of snow one to three months earlier than usual, and the great thawing started early.

"We measured melting rates that I would not have thought possible," says Matthias Huss.

And he thought to himself: What will happen up here if the summer continues so hot and dry?

In March he had a premonition of how bad things could get for the glaciers this year.

When he set out for the winter measurements for the first time in the mountains, there was far too little snow.

Bad for the glaciers: Because the white, fluffy material acts like a blanket, reflects the sun's rays and thus protects the ice.

If too little snow falls in winter or if it melts too early, the glacier is completely at the mercy of the scorching summer sun.

To the suffering of the glaciers, a massive layer of Saharan dust settled on the snow cover in late winter, which accelerated the thawing.

The ice tongue of the Unteres Eismeer glacier is thinning.

A lake lies on a rock step that was still covered by ice in 2010.

It snowed particularly little in winter on the south side of the Alps.

On his tours, Huss went through passages where the snow piled up meters high in previous years.

This year, however, he found only a thin layer of snow even at 3,500 meters.

And he knew: all it takes is a heat wave and the snow is gone immediately.

In mid-May it got scorching hot.

The last month of spring is particularly important, says Matthias Huss, May decides the layer of snow with which the glaciers start the summer months.

But the endless summer of 2022 already started in the merry month, until the end of August the temperatures were well above average in the entire Alpine region.

Hardly any rain fell, and there wasn't any snow anyway.

There was not a single late onset of winter, as is typical in the high altitudes well into July.

Even night frosts were comparatively rare.

The sad result of this horror year was an unprecedented melting rate.

It was three times as high as usual, worse than in 2003, says Matthias Huss.

"I would have expected a year like 2022 in the middle of the century," says Huss.

But not so early.

Until a few months ago, he would not have trusted the melting rates of the climate models.

Now the most pessimistic model simulations have occurred.

"I would have expected a year like 2022 in the middle of the century."

Matthias Huss, glaciologist

"The year could not have gone worse," summarizes Matthias Huss.

This is exactly where the scientist has the opportunity to understand how the unexpectedly high values ​​came about and to draw lessons for the future.

He and his team are currently working on the exact figures for the mass balance, and the accounts will be settled at the end of September.

On summer vacation, Huss felt strange leaving his glaciers behind.

When he was finally back in Switzerland at the end of July, he couldn't believe his eyes in his home garden.

The Vrenelisgärtli, which he has been looking at since he was a child, no longer had a white cap for the first time.

Snow and ice on the 2915 meter high massif had completely melted.

Now there was no longer a glowing field at the top, just a black, gloomy mountain, he says.

An unfamiliar sight, but one that he will have to get used to.

The future of the Alps is black.

Huss calls his tours into the ice euthanasia.

That sounds joking, but should be understood as a reminder.

Three years ago he buried the Pizol glacier in eastern Switzerland.

That had been his favorite.

At the foot of the glacier, which had collapsed into ice remnants, he gave a eulogy and drew attention to the disappearance of many small glaciers that, despite the greatest efforts to protect the climate, can no longer be saved.

Climate change is claiming the first victims, it is eating up the glaciers, that is to say.

In this respect, Matthias Huss can also be understood as an ambassador for the glaciers.

Or just as an undertaker.

At the end of August he climbed the Corvatsch in the Engadin to dig deeper into the measuring rods.

Even at over 3,000 meters, the glacier had lost a layer of almost six meters, about twice the previous record, says Huss.

He will give up the measurement program there, it no longer makes sense.

Glaciologists also bid farewell to their glaciers in neighboring countries.

In the Bavarian Alps, three of the five glaciers have been dying for some time, and 2022 could mark their definitive end.

Strictly speaking, the Watzmann glacier and the blue ice in the Berchtesgadener Land are already behind them, now the southern Schneeferner on the Zugspitzplatt could also believe it.

The once proud glacier has melted down to a measly remnant of ice, and its end is near.

A turquoise meltwater river flows between boulders over the glacier ice on the Gornergletscher.

There are similar images from France and northern Italy, and in Austria too, only remnants were left of some glaciers in the Silvretta mountain range this summer.

All that remains of the eternal ice is dead ice - that's what glaciologists call blocks of ice that break off when they melt and are then no longer connected to the glacier.

Because a glacier has to move in order to remain one, otherwise it is history.

And many glaciers are closer to this fate than one would have thought for a long time.

Below 3500 meters, most ice masses will not survive.

Andrea Fischer from the Institute for Interdisciplinary Mountain Research of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Innsbruck also speaks of an "never observed event".

All glaciers have suffered greatly, she reports, regardless of size and altitude.

The losses are heaviest in the west and south of the country, worse than in the north and east.

On the Jamtalferner on the Swiss border, the loss of ice is currently four meters, the previous maximum was only one meter.

The extreme summer of 2003 has already been topped, says Andrea Fischer, and the situation could get worse because there is no end in sight to the meltdown.

On her measurement tours in the mountains, she observed how cavities have formed below the glacier tongues and how the edges of the ice stand out from the ground - as a result of reduced flow speeds, as she says.

Rocky islands are appearing in the formerly closed sheets of ice, further accelerating the decay.

The summer gave her a lot of work and headaches, she says.

The dangers that arise have been shown at the Marmolada in the Dolomites.

Parts of the glacier came loose there at the beginning of July and thundered towards the valley, killing eleven climbers.

This ice break was unusual, says Fischer.

They usually occur in steep terrain when the ice breaks off due to the glacier advance.

For five years, however, Fischer has been observing a different mechanism.

Subglacial cavities are formed that were previously simply pushed in by the flowing glacier.

Now that many glaciers are stationary, the voids are expanding.

If the sun then penetrates through the thinning ice, the ground warms up and the ice melts not only from above but also from below.

The fatal thing about this process is that it cannot be recognized from the outside.

neither cracks form,

the ice is still cracking.

However, if the cavity in the steep terrain becomes too large at some point, the chunks of ice fall down.

Then, without warning, a mixture of ice, water and rubble shoots down into the valley.

Since there have been records of glaciers in the Austrian Alps, such situations have never been observed, she says.

And that has been around since the Middle Ages.

The new lake on the edge of the Rhone Glacier is growing year by year.

The drifting icebergs have broken off the glacier front.

But not only the glaciers are victims of the sweating Alps, but also the permafrost, which holds the mountains together like cement.

From 2500 to 3000 meters upwards, the Alpine peaks are frozen.

The permafrost bonds rock, stone and scree, giving the mountains support and stability.

But now the mountains are thawing faster and earlier than ever before – and are crumbling.

Larger rockfalls and landslides are increasing - the danger on the mountain is increasing.

Matthias Huss also warns of this.

And he worries about the widening crevasses in the winter months.

Should a lot of snow fall, the crevasses would gradually be covered.

Still, he's also optimistic, at least in the long term.

The fate of the glaciers is not as hopeless as the year 2022 would suggest, he says.

"We can save a third of the glaciers." The prerequisite for this, however, is consistent climate protection - and now.

Otherwise the ice giants will gradually melt and be washed into the sea.

Lakes then form on the glacier front, and up to 683 of them could form in the Alps by the end of the century.

One of the largest lakes would be found on the Aletsch, probably in twenty years.

One and a half square kilometers in size and up to 300 meters deep.

It might be nice to see 

The photos shown here come from the photo book "AlpenEis - Gletscher und Permafrost im Klimaklima" by Bernhard Edmaier and Angelika Jung-Hüttl, 224 pages, published in 2022 by Rother Bergverlag.

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