[1/2]The Belvedere Hotel is pictured on September 26, 2023 near the Rhône Glacier in Obergoms, Switzerland, during climate change.REUTERS/Dennis Bariboos Obtaining license rights
ZURICH, Sept 28 (Reuters) – Swiss glaciers have suffered their second-worst melt rate this year after a record decline in 2022, with total glacier volume shrinking by 10% in the past two years. The watchdog group Gramos announced on Thursday.
The report said Switzerland’s glaciers suffered a one-two punch during the third hottest summer on record, meaning they lost as much ice in two years as they did in the 30 years before 1990. He called the loss “devastating.”
“This year has been very problematic for glaciers because there was really little snow in the winter and a very warm summer,” Matthias Huss, head of the Swiss Glacier Monitoring Organization (GLAMOS), told Reuters.
“The combination of these two factors is the worst thing that can happen to a glacier.”
More than half of the Alps’ glaciers are in Switzerland, where climate change is causing temperatures to rise about twice the global average.
Gramos said this year’s low winter snowfall and the late start and end of the summer snowmelt season led to heavy losses.
Switzerland’s weather service announced that the highest overnight freezing altitude in August, the peak of snowmelt, was recorded at 5,289 meters (17,350 feet), higher than the summit of Mont Blanc. This surpassed last year’s record of 5,184 meters.
Photos Hass posted on social media during data-gathering trips in recent weeks include a new lake forming next to a glacier tongue for the first time on record, streams of meltwater flowing through ice caves and thinning ice. The photograph showed a bare rock sticking out from above. In some places, bodies lost long ago are being recovered as the ice sheets shrink.
“We’re really losing small glaciers,” Hass said. “The remaining ice is becoming covered with rocks and debris, and areas that have been covered in snow and ice for decades and centuries are becoming nothing more than black slopes that are dangerous from falling rocks.”
In some locations, GLAMOS had to stop monitoring due to melting.
“We have stopped one of our monitoring programs because a small glacier in central Switzerland is too dangerous to measure,” Hass said. “It became much smaller and therefore less representative.”
Records in Switzerland go back at least to 1960, and for some glaciers to 1914.
Written by Emma Farge.Editing: Timothy Gardner
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