Les Diablerets. The tongue of land that makes up the Tsanfleuron Pass had not been in the open air for 2,000 years and Roman times: a dry winter and heat waves that scorched Europe this summer managed to overcome the ice that still resisted.
The pass is located at the junction of that glacier and the Scex Rouge glacier, at an altitude of about 2,800 meters, between the cantons of Vaud and Valais, in southwestern Switzerland. It is located in the Glacier 3000 ski resort.
For several days, the tongue of land can be seen completely discovered, despite the fact that “in 2021, a measurement had revealed an ice thickness of about 15 meters in that area,” he said in a statement from that station.
For Mauro Fischer, a glaciologist at the University of Bern, “the thickness loss of the glaciers in the Diablerets region will be, on average, three times higher this year compared to the past 10.”
But the melting phenomenon – currently accelerated – does not occur only in this part of Switzerland.
Glaciers have lost 50 percent of their volume since 1931, according to a study published in August in the journal The cryosphere by researchers who, for the first time, managed to reconstitute the retreat of glaciers in the 20th century.
The melting of the ice in the Alps – which experts attribute to climate change – has been closely watched since the beginning of the 21st century, but until now little was known about its evolution in the preceding decades.
Photos taken between 1916 and 1947
For the study, the glaciologists used archival images (21,700 photographs taken between 1916 and 1947) covering 86 percent of Switzerland’s glacial surface and stereophotogrammetry, a technique that determines the nature, shape and position of an object using portraits.
According to these experts from the Zurich Polytechnic School and the Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research, “compared with data from the 2000s, (…) it had halved between 1931 and 2016.”
The study authors also found that glaciers did not retreat continuously over the past century: in fact, there were even times of increased mass in the 1920s and 1980s.
But today, the ice is melting faster and faster: in just six years (between 2016 and 2022), they lost 12 percent of their volume, according to the Swiss glacier monitoring network Glamos.
Matthias Huss, director of that network, highlighted the seriousness of the situation in 2022. “Other years, such as 2011, 2015, 2018 and even 2019, we already saw a very strong thaw. (But) the current one is really different and breaks all records, ”he told the ATS-Keystone agency.
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