Effects of climate change: Swiss glaciers have halved

Created: 08/27/2022, 13:44

By: Stefanie Fischhaber

The glaciers in Switzerland have halved over the past century.

© Imago/McPHOTO

Many glaciers are melting due to global warming.

The effect for the 21st century is easy to predict.

Researchers from Switzerland now looked into the past.

Bern - Periods of heat and drought, global warming and little snow: climate change is also affecting the glaciers in the Alps.

For the first time, researchers have reconstructed the development of Swiss glaciers over the past century.

The result: in Switzerland there is now only half as much glacier ice as there was 90 years ago.

Global warming: Switzerland is losing 50 percent of its glaciers

Between 1931 and 2016, Switzerland lost almost half of its glacial ice.

This is what researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH) and the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL) found out.

They published their results in the journal The Cryosphere.

To do this, they examined around 21,000 photos that were taken with the help of surveyors at various locations and covered 86 percent of the glaciated area in Switzerland.

Using these images, the scientists were able to estimate the volume of the glacier surface and compare it with current measurements.

Climate researchers from Switzerland with a gloomy prognosis: Accelerated glacier shrinkage

"If we know the surface of a glacier at two different points in time, we can calculate the difference in volume," explained the study's lead author, Erik Schytt Mannerfelt.

In 1928, for example, the Fiescher glacier was still like a large sea of ​​ice.

In 2021 only small white spots could be seen on the mountainside.

The results from Switzerland paint a bleak picture: Not only has the Alpine country lost around half of its glacier area, but according to the measurement data from the Glamos glacier measurement network, the ice loss has even accelerated since 2016.

Accordingly, the ice volume of the glaciers has shrunk by a further twelve percent in the past six years.

But Switzerland is not the only country experiencing rapid decline: in Austria, researchers found that all glaciers will have melted by the end of the century.

Fewer and fewer glaciers in the Alps

Not all glaciers were equally affected.

"The extent to which the volume has decreased essentially depends on three factors: firstly, at what height the glaciers are, secondly, how flat the glacier tongue runs out, and thirdly, how heavily the glaciers are covered with debris," ETH reported.

In the 1920s and 1980s, the mass of individual glaciers increased and individual glacier advances occurred.

“Even though growth has occurred over shorter periods of time, it's still important to look at the bigger picture.

Our comparison between the years 1931 and 2016 clearly shows that there was a significant glacial retreat during this period," said ETH glaciologist Daniel Farinotti.