Germany: disappearance of an alpine glacier after the particularly hot summer

This is one of the consequences of the particularly hot summer that has just passed.

The southern part of the Schneeferner Glacier in the Bavarian Alps has melted at an accelerated rate and permanently lost its glacier status, the Bavarian Academy of Sciences announced on Monday.

The thickness of the ice no longer even reaches 2 m in many places, and less than 6 m in the deepest places, according to ground-penetrating radar measurements carried out in September.

In 2018, it was still 10 m, recalls the academy in a press release.

“We deduce that the rest of the ice will have completely melted within a year or two,” she adds.

"At the same time, the surface of the glacier has shrunk to less than 1 ha, which is about half as much as in 2018".

Faster than expected melting

There therefore remain officially four sites still fulfilling the criteria for glaciers in Bavaria: the northern part of the Schneeferner, the Höllentalferner, on the famous Zugspitze massif (2,962 m altitude) and the glaciers of Watzmann (2,713 m) and Blaueis (2,607 m), on the Berchtesgarden massif.

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A report released two years ago by the regional government warned of a faster-than-expected melting of glaciers, the last of which could disappear completely within a decade, while earlier estimates had set the fateful date at 2050 “Climate change is hitting the Bavarian glaciers hard,” local Environment Minister Thorsten Glauber said at the time.

The melting of glaciers in the Alps and elsewhere in the world, attributed to global warming, has been closely monitored since the early 2000s. Two years ago, a study published in the journal Nature revealed that their rapid melting these twenty years has now contributed to more than 20% of sea level rise.