Swiss glaciers have had 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 remained for millennia re-emerged at one site, while bodies and even a plane lost elsewhere in the Alps decades ago were recovered. Other small glaciers were all but vanished.
Matthias Huss, head of the Swiss Glacier Monitoring Network GLAMOS, said that with climate scenarios, this situation would come at some point in the future. This was probably the most surprising or shocking experience of the summer, because of the fact that the future is already here, right now. More than half of the glaciers in the Alps are in Switzerland where temperatures are rising by about 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 because melting ice risked dislodging their measuring poles and wrecking their data.
The heavy losses this year, which totaled around 3 cubic kilometers of ice, were the result of exceptionally low winter snowfall and back to back heatwaves. Snowfall replenishes ice lost each summer and helps protect glaciers from further melting by reflecting sunlight back to the atmosphere.
The Alps glaciers are expected to lose more than 80% of their current mass by the year 2100 if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise. According to a report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, many of the world's largest economies will disappear regardless of what action is taken now, due to the global warming baked in by past emissions.