At Europe's melting glaciers, signs of climate peril are everywhere Europe's glaciers are shrinking faster than anywhere else on Earth, leaving behind unstable landscapes. MORTERATSCH, Switzerland — Almost 7,000 feet above sea level, the trail leading up to Morteratsch Glacier gets a little longer every year. Leo Hösli has made the climb many times. Each step sends shards of stone clattering downhill, debris once sealed beneath glacial ice. Several months ago, Hösli, who is doing doctoral research on Morteratsch, drilled seven stakes into the ice caves at the base of the glacier. By early August, he couldn’t get close enough to take measurements. The summer melt was so fierce that the caves had become too unstable to enter. Setting up a zoom lens, he found only one stake still in place. “They’ve melted out or collapsed under these parts of the ice cave that have fallen down,” Hösli said. “It’s just too warm for the glacier to exist at this state right now.” Europe’s glaciers are shrinking faster, in every dimension, than anywhere else on Earth. A landmark study published in the journal Nature, the largest of its kind, using field measurements and satellite data from 35 research teams, found glaciers in the Alps and Pyrenees have lost about 40% of their mass since 2000. 2022 and 2023 set records for percentage loss, coinciding with peak global temperatures. Morteratsch Glacier retreat in the Swiss Alps The Swiss glacier has cumulatively lost more than 9,400 feet since observations began in 1881, according to data from a group that’s tracking the glacier’s terminus position. Morteratsch is one of the most studied glaciers in the world, thanks to its accessibility and its dramatic retreat, more than 2 miles in the last 165 years, driven by human-induced climate change. During our hike up the glacier, Hösli pointed to artifacts that showed just how far the glacier has retreated. “I think walking up here and seeing the signposts, seeing where the glacier used to be a hundred years ago, 50 years ago has more of an effect than just seeing it in a picture,” he said But the soundtrack is just as striking as the view: rocks clattering down the valley walls, the constant roar of meltwater. Glaciers are the planet’s most visible climate indicators, but because they’re remote, their loss can feel abstract. In Europe, glaciers support several important industries, like agriculture and tourism. Communities depend on meltwater for drinking and farming, as well as on the ice and snow for winter tourism. Downstream, it feeds rivers that eventually result in rising sea levels worldwide. The retreat of glaciers has also left behind unstable landscapes that are rapidly shifting, causing destructive landslides that threaten Alpine villages. Across the border in Austria, Andrea Fischer, the vice-director of the Austrian Academy of Sciences’ Institute for Interdisciplinary Mountain Research, said these kinds of mass alpine movements are becoming stronger and more frequent. “One-third of Austria’s glaciers will vanish in the next five years,” Fischer said, standing on what remains of the Stubai Glacier, about 72 miles northeast of Morteratsch. At the top of one of Austria’s most popular ski resorts, Stubai is projected to disappear entirely by 2033. “The end of the Alpine glaciers is really coming very, very close. And we see it. It’s not modeling in the computer. It’s a real fact,” Fischer added as she navigated down a muddy track to the edge of the ice. Global temperatures keep climbing as international efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions falter. Last year was the hottest on record, according to NASA. The U.S. withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement significantly undermined global climate efforts, making the already difficult goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (about 3 degrees Fahrenheit) close to impossible. Europe is the fastest-warming continent on Earth and Austria’s temperature has risen 3.1 degrees Celsius since 1900, more than twice the global average. Studying glaciers, Fischer said, is critical to understanding where the climate is headed. “Glaciers are climate archives,” she said. Glaciers preserve records of precipitation and atmospheric circulation stretching back centuries, data that exists nowhere else. “I’m really hunting for every piece of cold ice containing this archive information,” she said, before it’s all gone. For decades, Fischer experimented with ways to slow glacier loss: snowmaking, pumping water into snowpack, “wrapping” ice in reflective white sheets she calls “glacier plasters,” referring to bandages. Twenty years ago, she hoped these sheets could work on a large scale. Today, she knows they can’t. “There is no possibility to save glaciers without saving the climate,” she added. Living in the Alps has always been risky, Fischer said, but today the risks are amplified by global warming At the base of the Stubai valley, last month, a massive landslide barreled through the village of Neustift, ripping through farmland and damaging a bridge. No one was injured. But Fischer ties it directly to climate change. Melting permafrost can weaken peaks. Heavier rains trigger slides on slopes left destabilized by retreating glaciers. Back in Switzerland, the village of Blatten was obliterated by a glacial slide in May. Villagers were evacuated, but the costly rebuilding will take years. “The next 20 to 50 years will bring extreme changes for us living in the mountains, for all people living on the whole globe,” she said. “And we have to think about the consequences.” And the solutions are within our control, she said. She and Hösli agree that it’s not too late. There’s still a lot worth saving. “There’s still huge amounts of ice here,” Hösli said, scanning the top of Morteratsch. “It’s not a completely lost cause for me. There still is hope and there’s still something we can do,” Hösli said. “It’s too early to give up.
Haven't watched the vid yet, but I've got a real good idea what it's about. It's been theoretically thrown around for the past couple of decades, but in the not-too-far-off future the "Water Wars" will be the next major global conflict.
Somewhat related. A fiber optic cable spied on Greenland’s glaciers. It found an alarming problem. One of the buzziest technologies in modern science may be running right under your feet. Fiber optic cables bring you the internet as data-rich pulses of light, but they also detect signals from the surrounding environment: Researchers can analyze the light that’s scattered when a volcanic eruption or tsunami jostles the wiring. Known as distributed acoustic sensing, or DAS, the technique is so sensitive that it can track your footsteps as you walk over a cable, and may one day even warn you of an impending earthquake. Now, researchers have laid a fiber optic cable on the seafloor near a glacier in Greenland, revealing in unprecedented detail what happens during a calving event, when chunks of ice drop into the ocean. That, in turn, could help solve a long-standing conundrum and better understand the hidden processes driving the rapid deterioration of the island’s ice sheet, which would add 23 feet to sea levels if it disappeared. Even before humans started changing the climate, Greenland’s glaciers were calving naturally. The island is covered in glaciers that slowly flow toward the ocean, breaking into icebergs that float out to sea. When temperatures were lower, the ice sheet was also readily regenerating as snow fell. As temperatures have climbed, though, more melting is creating more meltwater, which flows underneath glaciers, lifting and lubricating them. “It can actually affect how fast the ice flows,” said Michalea King, a senior research scientist at the University of Washington’s Polar Science Center, who wasn’t involved in the new research. “So not only do you have the loss of mass from the melt directly at the surface, but then you’re also impacting how rapidly these big conveyor belts of ice — these big outlet glaciers — are flowing.” Accordingly, Greenland now sheds much more ice than it regenerates. “It’s like you’re spending more out of your checking account, and so your account balance has been going down for a couple decades,” said Paul Bierman, a geoscientist at the University of Vermont and author of When the Ice Is Gone: What a Greenland Ice Core Reveals About Earth’s Tumultuous History and Perilous Future. (Bierman wasn’t involved in the new research.) “This paper is a big advance in that it gives us some of the process details in places where we really haven’t had it before.” The challenge is that models majorly underestimate the amount of ice melting where Greenland’s glaciers touch the sea, suggesting that they’re not accounting for a process that is amplifying that net loss. That’s not due to a lack of effort from glaciologists — it’s just extremely dangerous to get up close to massive chunks of falling ice to collect data. Taking a different tack in a fjord in south Greenland, researchers strung 6 miles of cable parallel to a glacier’s “calving front.” Whenever the glacier fractured, or dropped ice into the water, it “plucked” the cable, like a guitarist plucking a string. These vibrations scattered light in the fiber optics back to two “interrogator” devices, powered by solar panels and batteries, on land. One of these handled the DAS data, or the acoustics propagating through the water, while the other determined temperature changes in the fjord. “If you fracture wood, you see the fracture propagating, but you also hear it,” said Dominik Gräff, an environmental scientist at University of Washington and lead author of a new paper describing the work in the journal Nature. “That’s exactly what DAS does.” These glacial fractures look distinct in the DAS data from a more catastrophic loss of ice into the fjord, the calving from the ice front. “These ice blocks can be as big as a stadium,” Gräff said. “When they plunge, they excite these waves.” If you’ve seen video of a calving event, you know how dramatic that excitation can be, as a wall of water rushes away from the ice. (That’s technically classified as a tsunami, though a much smaller one than those that move across whole oceans after earthquakes.) But the DAS system also picked up a hidden movement of water beneath the surface, as waves — some as tall as skyscrapers — pulsed across the seafloor cable, raising and lowering the interface between cold surface waters and warm deep waters. Typically, warmer, saltier water sinks to the bottom because it is denser, while colder, fresher water from glacial melt sits at the surface. The latter also forms a sort of insulating layer at the edge of the glacier, preventing more melting. But the fiber optic cable showed that as an iceberg dropped into the fjord, it stirred those warmer waters to the surface and disturbed the insulating layer, thus encouraging more melting of the glacier. And as the iceberg drifted away from the glacier, it stirred still more water, like a boat creating its own wake, but invisible under the surface. This could be the missing piece of that scientific puzzle, as models aren’t representing this widescale stirring, which could be encouraging more calving, which produces more stirring, which encourages more calving. “Maybe this study is the key to why, in practice, in real life, we have much higher melt rates than what we would expect,” said Mathieu Morlighem, a glaciologist at Dartmouth College who wasn’t involved in the research. “They are able to capture a lot of the physics that we didn’t even know was happening.” In contrast to scientists boating around a calving front, fiber optic cables cheaply, safely, and passively collect reams of data. These researchers were only able to operate their cable for three weeks, but they plan to do further studies that use readings from much longer timescales, monitoring how calving changes throughout the year. If they’re able to deploy more cables near Greenland’s coastal cities, they might even be able to design an early-warning system for ice-induced tsunamis, like other scientists are trying to do with DAS for earthquakes. Now it’s a race against time to better understand Greenland’s ice as it falls into deeper peril, as calving begets more calving. “That’s the kind of thing that scares geoscientists like me,” Bierman said. “That if you have these reinforcing feedback loops, and you start down a path of losing ice from Greenland, that could accelerate the rate of that loss.”
I agree and the research in Seawater Desalination needs to be really stepped up. My parents had a water well to around 120' deep. The water was for household use and for their cattle. About four miles South of them was a Grass Farm that used quite a bit of water for irrigation and we had no idea how deep their well was. Regulations for water rights and usage are lagging and it probably isn't going to end well.
"all I know about is Texas, and out here you're on your own." The ship sailed years ago for Texas doing responsible things with regard to ground and/or surface water. Your grandkids or whatever generation that is will be living in the Chihuahuan Desert. The coastal people will have been forced to move 50 miles inland.
