Glaciers disappearing in Swiss Alps: 50% reduction in volume since 1931

The Swiss glaciers lost the 50% of their volume since 1931according to a report released today by scientists, who for the first time represented the retreat of glaciers during the 20th century.

The melting of glaciers in the Alps — which experts attribute to global warming — has been closely monitored since the beginning of the new millennium. But researchers don’t know much about their evolution over the past decades, because at the time only certain glaciers were closely monitored.

In order to better understand their evolution, researchers from the Federal University of Technology Zurich (EPFZ) and the Federal Research Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape (WSL) proceeded to reconstruct the topography of all Swiss glaciers that existed in 1931.

“On the basis of these reconstructions and comparing with the data of the years 2000, the researchers conclude that the volume of the glaciers halved from 1931 to 2016,” EPEZ and WSL said in a statement.

The report, published in the scientific journal The Cryosphere, says the scientists resorted to archival images (21,700 photographs taken between 1916 and 1947) covering 86% of the surface of the Swiss glaciers and stereophotogrammetry, a technique that allows determine the nature, form and position of an object by means of images.

“If we know the surface morphology of a glacier at two different times, we can calculate the difference in glacier volume,” the report’s lead author, Erik Sitt Mannerfeld, said in a statement.

The result is amazing.

So the Fisher Glacierof which only a few tiny white spots remained in 2021, looked like a vast sea of ​​ice in 1928.

According to the scientists, the glaciers did not retreat continuously during the last century. There were even periods when their mass increased in the 1920s and 1980s.

Despite this increase in the short term, “our comparison between 1931 and 2016 clearly shows that there was a significant retreat of the glaciers during this period,” said one of the report’s authors, Daniel Farinotti, professor of glaciology at the EPFZ and WSL.

And the glaciers have been melting faster and faster since then.

So while they lost 50% of their volume between 1931 and 2016, it took just six years—from 2016 to 2022—to lose 12%, according to the Swiss Registry Network. GLAMOS.

For Farinotti, the evidence is irrefutable: “The retreat of the glaciers is accelerating.”

RES-EMP

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