Swiss glaciers see record melt rate

Swiss glaciers have recorded their worst melt rate since records began more than a century ago, losing 6% of their remaining volume this year, or nearly double the previous record of 2003, the monitoring body GLAMOS said on Wednesday.

The melt was so extreme this year that bare rock that had been buried for millennia was re-emerged at one site, while bodies and even a plane lost elsewhere in the Alps decades ago were recovered. Other small glaciers have all but vanished.

At least somewhere in the future, Matthias Huss, head of the Swiss Glacier Monitoring Network GLAMOS, said that we knew with climate scenarios that this situation would come. This was probably the most surprising or shocking experience of this summer, because of the fact that the future is already here, right now. In Switzerland, more than half of the glaciers are in the Alps, where temperatures are rising by around twice the global average.

Scientists across the Alps, including Huss, have been forced to do emergency repair work at dozens of sites across the Alps, as melting ice risked dislodging their measuring poles and wrecking their data.

The winter snowfall combined with back to back heatwaves resulted in a lot of heavy losses this year, which totaled about 3 cubic kilometers of ice. Snowfall replenishes ice lost each summer and helps protect glaciers from further melting by reflecting sunlight back to the atmosphere.

If greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, the Alps glaciers are expected to lose more than 80% of their current mass by the year 2100. According to a report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, many will disappear regardless of what action is taken now, thanks to global warming baked in by past emissions.