When Matthias Huss, Today Director of the Glami program for the monitoring of Swiss glaciers visited the Rhone glacier for the first time in Switzerland, 35 years ago, a few steps were enough to reach the ice from the parking lot. Today, to get there, you have to walk half an hour.
Thus begins the BBC dossier which is based on the data provided by the Swiss glaciers’ monitoring network, which lost 3% of their surface during the summer just ended.
Whenever I come back, I can’t help but think about when I was a child, Huss tells, pitting impressive data.
A silent but global collapse
It is not just a Swiss question. According to the world meteorological organization (WMO), in 2024 only the glaciers outside the caps of Greenland and Antarctica lost 450 billion tons of ice, the equivalent of a 7 km ice cube on each side, enough to fill 180 million Olympic swimming pools.
“The glaciers are melt everywhere,” explains the Climatologist Ben Marzeion. “They are found in a climate that has become hostile for them because of human emissions”.
The Alps are among the most affected areas: a quarter of Swiss ice has disappeared in just ten years. In 2022 a dramatic record touched, with almost 6% of the ice lost in one year, three times more than what glaciologists once considered a “extreme” given.
Glaciers who retreat, lakes that advance
The satellite images impressively show the withdrawal of the Rhone glacier from 1990 to today: where there was compact ice, a glacial lake now extends. The glacier Claridenremained stable for most of the twentieth century, has begun to dissolve quickly in the last twenty years. Some, like the Pizol glacier, have already disappeared completely.
The Gries glacier retired by 2.2 km in a century; The MOMB is no longer joined with Mortetetsch; And the great Aletsch, the largest of the Alps, has lost 2.3 km of extension in 75 years. Where once the ice dominated, trees grow today.
It is not a natural phenomenon: it is our fault
The glaciers have always expanded and restricted over the centuries, but today’s rhythm has no precedent. Starting from the mid -nineteenth century, with the beginning of industrialization and the massive use of coal, the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere has risen dramatically, triggering a heating that accelerated the melting of the ice.
The rapid losses of the last forty years cannot be explained without considering human emissions, clarifies Marzeion. Even if from tomorrow the global warming stopped, the glaciers would still continue to take back for decades: their destiny is already largely marked.
It is not just a matter of landscape: it is our water reserve that disappears
The glaciers are the natural tanks of humanity: they store snow and water in cold periods and gradually release it during the summer, guaranteeing constant water resources for agriculture, hydroelectric energy and human consumption.
Their disappearance means:
In the Asian regions, called “third pole” for the huge amount of ice present, about 800 million people depend directly on the glaciers to irrigate the fields and survive in dry periods.
You need to act immediately
According to a study published in Science, half of the world mountain ice can still be saved if global warming is contained within +1.5 ° C compared to pre -industrial levels.
Continuing along the current trajectory, which brings us to +2.7 ° C by the end of the century, would mean losing three quarters of the residual glaciers, with catastrophic consequences.
It is sad – admits the glaciologist Regine Hock from the pages of the BBC – but at the same time it is responsible. If we drastically reduce emissions and our carbon imprint, we can still preserve a significant part of these ecosystems.
In other words, the crisis of glaciers is not inevitable: it is in our hands.
Sources: BBC / Wmo / Glamos
