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The volume of Swiss glaciers halved since 1931

2022-08-22T15:07:59.120Z


The melting of the ice is irremediable and is accelerating. Researchers have shown that glaciers in Switzerland were halved from 1931 to


There is the “unusual” aspect of the discovery of planes and corpses that have long since disappeared.

But the melting of the ice in the Alps, accelerated by global warming, is also measurable by experts.

And she is impressive.

Swiss glaciers have lost half their volume since 1931, according to a study published on Monday by scientists, who have for the first time reconstructed the retreat of glaciers in the 20th century.

The melting of glaciers in the Alps - which experts attribute to global warming - has been closely monitored since the early 2000s. closely followed.

Read also“The cold had frozen everything”: the melting of the glaciers frees the mummies of missing mountaineers

To better understand their evolution, researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ) and the Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL) proceeded to reconstruct the topography of the set of Swiss glaciers that existed in 1931.

The glaciers of the Alps, like here that of the Gorner in Switzerland, disappeared in almost a century because of global warming.

Based on these reconstructions and comparing with data from the 2000s, the researchers conclude that glacier volume was halved between 1931 and 2016,” ETHZ and WSL said in a statement.

The study, published in the scientific journal La Cryosphère, indicates that glaciologists used archival images (21,700 photographs taken between 1916 and 1947) covering 86% of the Swiss glacial surface and stereophotogrammetry, a technique which makes it possible to determine the nature, the shape and the position of an object thanks to images.

The melting is accelerating

“If we know the surface topography of a glacier at two different times, we can calculate the difference in ice volume,” study lead author Erik Schytt Mannerfelt said in the release.

Thus, the Fiescher glacier, of which only a few tiny white spots remained in 2021, looked like a huge sea of ​​ice in 1928.

The Fiescher Glacier in Switzerland which looked like a huge sea of ​​ice in 1928 has all but disappeared.

Glaciers have not retreated continuously over the past century, scientists say.

They even experienced episodes of mass growth in the 1920s and 1980s. Despite this growth over short-term periods, "our comparison between the years 1931 and 2016 clearly shows that there was significant glacial retreat during this period," said one of the study's authors, Daniel Farinotti, professor of glaciology at ETHZ and WSL.

And the glaciers are now melting at an increasingly rapid rate.

While they lost 50% of their volume between 1931 and 2016, it only took them six years - between 2016 and 2022 - to lose 12%, according to the Swiss glacier survey network GLAMOS.

For Professor Farinotti, the evidence is irrefutable: “The retreat of glaciers is accelerating.

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Source: leparis

All life articles on 2022-08-22

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