I am climbing Switzerland’s Rhône glacier when I feel a thump deep under my feet, then another. The glacier is shifting and cracking as it slides down the mountain, opening new crevasses within. Dazzling blue melt streams grow and multiply across the sooty ice.
Every few minutes, melting glacial remnants on the valley wall unleash rocks that crash down with the rumble of cannon fire, raising clouds of dust. Suddenly, the 20 metres of ice under my crampons doesn’t feel very solid. A 4-metre aluminium tube has emerged so far from the ice that it has nearly tipped over.
Andreas Bauder at ETH Zurich in Switzerland pulls it out. For two decades, he has been drilling stakes into glaciers to measure how much of the surface melts away during the warm months. But this year caught him off guard.
Except when we have some special conditions like this summer,” he says. As a result, more than 9 metres of ice have melted off the surface of the Rhône glacier. While the stifling weather finally broke in mid-August, forecasters warn temperatures could remain above average through autumn, and another heatwave is possible.
The race to understand how and when Thwaites glacier will collapse If that happens, glaciers in the Alps will probably experience record ice loss this year, says Bauder, beating even 2022, when dark Saharan dust blown across the Mediterranean sped up the melt. This would mean another 6 per cent of all glacier ice in the Alps would disappear. Bauder and his colleagues were taking measurements on the Rhône glacier as part of ETH Zurich’s long-term monitoring of more than 100 glaciers.
Extreme melt years are occurring more frequently in the Alps, unleashing devastating avalanches of ice and rock and threatening to shrink major rivers. More than 1000 Swiss glaciers – 40 per cent of the total – have vanished in the past 50 years. Another 30 glaciers could join them this summer, in what the Swiss media has dubbed a “massacre”.
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