By Diya Mukherjee
The melting of snow on the Col de Tsanfleuron area, which was around fifteen metres thick until 2021, was sped up by last year’s weather patterns. Col de Tsanfleuron was hidden for over 2000 years, during the Roman Empire. The still-resisting snow has improved thanks to a dry winter and heat waves that burned Europe this summer.
The pass is situated at the confluence of the Sunfleuron glacier and the Saxe-Rouge glacier at an elevation of 2800 metres above sea level between the cantons of Vaud and Valais in Switzerland’s south-west. It’s part of the Glacier 3000 ski area.
The spit of land has been entirely exposed for the previous three days, but as Glacier 3000 points out in a press release, “the 2021 measurements revealed an ice thickness of about 15 meters in this area.”
According to the statement, “The summer of 2022, followed by low rainfall, is a disaster for glaciers.”
As per to Dr. Mauro Fischer, a glaciologist at the University of Bern, “the loss of thickness of the glaciers in the Diablerets region is on average 3 times greater this year compared to the last 10 summers.”
However, the melting phenomena, which is presently escalating, is distant from this portion of Switzerland.
As per a research published in August by experts who were the first to recreate the glacier’s retreat in the twentieth century, glaciers there have lost half their size since 1931.
Since the early 2000s, specialists have been closely monitoring the melting of glaciers in the Alps, which they ascribe to global warming. However, since a few glaciers have been observed since then, researchers know little about how they have altered in recent years.
Researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich) and the Federal Institute for Forest, Snow, and Landscape Research (WSL) rebuilt the topography of a group of Swiss glaciers in 1931 to help comprehend their development.
“Based on these reconstructions and comparisons with data from the 2000s, the researchers concluded that the size of the glaciers was halved between 1931 and 2016,” as per ETHZ and WSL.
The study, which was authored in the scientific journal La Cryosphere, suggests using archival images (21,700 photographs taken between 1916 and 1947) to cover 86% of the Swiss glacial surface, as well as stereophotogrammetry, which uses images to identify the nature, texture, and location of an object.
According to scientists, glaciers have not receded constantly over the last century, with periods of significant growth occurring in the 1920s and 1980s.
Given this short-term increase, “our comparison between the years 1931 and 2016 clearly shows that there was a significant glacial retreat during this period,” stated Daniele Farinotti, professor of glaciology at ETHZ and WSL and one of the authors of the study.
Glaciers are melting fast.
As per the Swiss glacier survey network GLAMOS, they lost 50% of their volume between 1931 and 2016, but it only took six years for them to drop 12% between 2016 and 2022.
Glamos director Matthias Huss predicts that 2022 will be a record year.
In September, he told ATS-Keystone, “Other years like 2011, 2015, 2018 or 2019 have already seen very strong melting. The year 2022 is really different and will break all records.”