Archive photo: Glaciers in Switzerland are on track to lose a huge amount of ice this year
Switzerland’s glaciers are on track to lose a huge amount of ice this year, as the melting of an ongoing heatwave in Europe accelerates, and the country is expected to reach ‘glacier loss day’ by Monday, the second earliest date ever recorded.This event marks the point at which all the snow and ice accumulated during the previous winter melts.
From then until October, each additional day of melting results in a net loss of glacier ice, shrinking the glaciers further.“We are now seeing massive ablation, ice melt rates and ice melt rates throughout the Alps,” Matthias Haas, head of Glacier Monitoring in Switzerland (GLAMOS), said on Friday, quoted by Agence France-Presse.“We are three months early compared to the state of health,” Haas added.
Heat wave accelerates the melting of the Alps
The only previous glacier loss day since records began in 2000 was in 2022, when it fell on June 26.
This year’s early arrival was driven by the extreme heatwave sweeping Europe, another unusually warm spell in May, and the lack of snowfall during the winter.Haas said he recently visited the Rhone Glacier and found that about one meter of ice had melted vertically in just 10 days.“It’s very impressive, and that’s just the effect of the heat wave,” he said.He stressed that one heat wave is not the greatest threat.
“The problem is that we have very high temperatures that last for a very long time,” he said, adding that long periods of extreme warmth are “very damaging to glaciers.”
Snowfall is weak Desert dust The situation worsened
According to Agence France-Presse, conditions this year are very similar to 2022, which remains the worst year on record for melting glaciers in the Alps.Haas said that the snow received by Switzerland on its glaciers is about 25 percent less than the average for the period 2010-2020. A warm May caused snow to disappear earlier than usual, exposing darker glacial ice that absorbed more solar radiation and accelerated its melting.He also pointed to dust blown off the Sahara in March as another factor worsening glacier conditions by reducing snow reflectivity.While the full extent of ice loss will be assessed in September, “it’s already clear now that we’re going to see very strong ice loss as well this year,” Haas said.
Climate change Driving extreme heat in Europe
The melting glaciers comes as scientists increasingly link record heat in Europe to climate change.A rapid attribution study by the World Weather Attribution group found that the current heatwave would be nearly impossible without human-induced climate change, with similar events now about 200 times more likely than they were just two decades ago.Researchers described the ongoing event as the most severe heat wave ever recorded across the region studied.Scientists found that temperatures during similar events in the 1970s were several degrees lower. Europe, the world’s fastest-warming continent, has seen temperatures rise at nearly twice the global average since the 1980s, according to the Associated Press.The researchers also warned that greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels continue to make extreme heat more frequent and intense.
Thousands of glaciers have already been lost
Swiss glaciers retreated about 170 years ago, but their melting has accelerated sharply in recent decades as the climate warms.The size of Switzerland’s glaciers will shrink by 38 percent between 2000 and 2024.The country has already lost about 1,200 glaciers over the past 50 years, with only 1,300 remaining today, Haas said.He warned: “If temperatures continue to rise as they have over the past decades, by 2100 we will only have some small remnants of ice left.”Shrinking glaciers are also threatening Europe’s major river systems, with meltwater from the Swiss Alps feeding rivers including the Rhine and Rhone, with significant long-term consequences for water supplies across the continent.