Lol. Buckle up. The rest of your life is going to be a wild ride.
The good thing about being permanently depressed because of climate change is that this isnt really devastating “news”.
And in Austria, some people just blew up part of a glacier to make room for a ski tournament. (sorry, no english source)
I don’t think that the glacier as an intact sheet of ice has value so much as it just is a particularly-visible sign of global warming, because small temperature changes to large masses of ice that are bounded by the melting temperature of water produce large changes to that mass.
They are THE most important source of water during the summer. Their importance cannot be overstated. Switzerland gets 60% of its electricity from hydro power, which from spring to late autumn is glacier melt water. They replenish in winter with snowfall then slowly let the snow melt in summer. Without them we get flooding in spring and drought in autunn. The Rhine and the Po rivers, crucially important to Germany and Italy, are fed by glaciers. Italy’s most productive agricultural areas are watered by the Po river. Switzerland will experience water shortages when the glaciers are gone, something the Swiss cannot fathom, because until now we always had so much water we could waste it and still have more left than we could ever use. And if Switzerland has too little water you can imagine what will happen to Italy and France.
And in Austria, some people just blew up part of a glacier to make room for a ski tournament. (sorry, no english source)
afaik they are important for the water supply of rivers in spring
I expect that the ice will still be melting wherever they put it. And according to the article, what they put in its place is snow on crushed rock, so that’ll probably be melting too.
The problem is that this melts in a few weeks in spring.
So we get flooding in spring and drought in autumn - instead of a nice steady flow from early spring to late autumn. The glaciers are irreplaceable.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Switzerland has lost 10% of its glaciers in just two years, research shows, after high summer heat and low winter snowfall.
The team at Glacier Monitoring Switzerland (GLAMOS) said the “massive ice loss” stemmed from a winter with very low volumes of snow - which falls on top of glaciers and protects them from exposure to direct sunlight - and high summer temperatures.
Images posted on social media by Matthias Huss, who leads GLAMOS, during data collection trips in recent weeks showed new lakes forming next to glacier tongues, as well as streams of melt water running through ice caves, and bare rock poking out from thinning ice.
More than half of the glaciers in the Alps are in Switzerland where temperatures are rising by around twice the global average due to climate change.
Read more:Antarctic winter sea ice hits ‘extreme’ record lowClimate models warn of apocalyptic future
But even in such areas, “a loss of over two metres of the average ice thickness is extremely high,” the team said.
The original article contains 459 words, the summary contains 170 words. Saved 63%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Good bot
…as conservatives celebrate and mock the rest of us.
Instead of snow fall, there is more rain fall over the mountains that had former a glacier there. Strong rainfalls that fall onto the stone and rubble and the end of permafrost lead to landslides and these strong rainfalls in a short amount of time are getting more frequent.
https://www.climatechangepost.com/switzerland/avalanches-and-landslides/
It is not just the glacier gone and the water missing in summer, it’s also more places where people live being in danger.
such as for the Aletsch Glacier in Valais and Plaine Morte Glacier in the canton of Bern, because they enjoyed more winter snowfall.
The locations are mixed up in this sentence
