by RHONGLECHER, Switzerland (AP) – drip, drip. Giant, gutter.
This is the sound of water that seeps out of a sun -grown and mushy Swiss glacier, which geoscientists monitored under the heat of global warming on signs of a continued withdrawal through the majestic ice mass.
In recent years, glaciologists like Matthias Huss from the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, known as ETHZ, and other dramatic measures to protect glaciers like the Rhone glacier that leads into the river of the same name that flows through Switzerland and France.
One of these desperate steps is to use huge leaves to cover the ice cream like blankets to slow down the melt.
Switzerland is the glacier capital of the continental Europe with around 1,400, which offer drinking water, irrigation for arable land in many parts of Europe, including French wine country, and hydropower, which produce most of the country’s stream.
The number wanes. The Alpine Land has already lost up to 1,000 small glaciers and the larger ones are increasingly at risk.
Drill in glaciers to follow what happens inside
Huss organized the Associated Press this month to visit the extensive glacier when he carried out his first surveillance mission when the summer temperatures accelerated the thawing. Under normal conditions, glaciers can regenerate in winter, but climate change threatens.
“I always say that glaciers are the ambassadors of climate change because they can spread this message in a very understandable way,” said Huss. “They also cause good feelings because glaciers are beautiful. We know them from our holidays.”
The huge area of blue, gray and white ice is full of cracks and grooves, and Huss says that his teams in the Swiss Glamos glacier surveillance group have discovered a new phenomenon in Switzerland: holes that appear under the surface that occasionally spread that the ice collides on top of each other.
Huss uses a snail to drill into the ice and send frosty chips up like a swarming fountain. It is part of a process in which rods and poles are used to pursue ice loss by melting.
A better understanding of the melts of the glacier
Huss not only monitors at the top, but also from the base of the glaciers.
“Usually, due to the warm air, glaciers melt due to their radiation from the sun from above. But in recent years we have found in several places that there is a material melt from below,” said Huss. “If there are some channels in the ice, circulating through the air, this can dig up large holes under the ice.”
The Alps were covered with ice cream 20,000 years ago, but no longer. It is the same story elsewhere. Experts have warned that two thirds of the world’s glaciers will disappear by the end of this century
Huss says that only people can help save them.
“It is difficult to save this very glacier because it could only be saved or at least more slowly withdrawn by setting the CO2 emissions,” he said. “But everyone can contribute alone to reduce CO2 emissions as far as possible.”
“This will not help this glacier immediately, but it will help all glaciers in the long range,” he added. “This is the most important thing we should think of when we see this melting ice and this big retreat – that it is time to act now.”
A glacier gives in and a village is destroyed
The concern about the glaciers of Switzerland recently increased after the southwestern village of Blatten, which was hidden near the birch glacier, was largely destroyed in May by a slide from rock and glacial ice. The village had been evacuated in front of the film, which covered dozens of houses and buildings and only left a few roofs.
A review of the data showed that the birch glacier was a rarity than it progresses while most glaciers declined. And his progress has increased in recent years to the point that it flows shortly before the collapse at about 10 meters (about 30 feet) per day – a rate that was described as “completely not sustainable”.
Huss said that the landslide had been triggered by rocks, which piled up on the glacier, even though he also described Birch’s advance as a “forerunner”.
The main installation from the Birken Glacier collapse, says Huss, is that “unexpected things happen”.
“If you ask me three weeks ago, nobody would have thought that the whole village would be destroyed,” he said. “I think this is the main lesson that we need to be learned that we have to be prepared.”
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The AP journalist Jamey Keaten in Geneva contributed to this report.
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