Achrainer has moved from hotel to hotel like this one since late May, when she was forced out of her home.
“The $1 million question is, did Blatten happen because of climate change?”
What we can see is that there were elements in this process chain that may well be related to climate change.”
“Glaciers have become a bit of a symbol of climate change just because they are so powerful in visualizing the change,” Farinotti says.
“When we talk climate change, we are talking about 1 degree of warming of global average temperatures.
RHÔNE GLACIER, Switzerland — Barbara Achrainer, sipping a latte on a hotel veranda with a view of Lake Lucerne, sighs as she looks out at tourists getting on a tour boat. In the distance, the Alps are silhouetted by a haze created by the hot air over the turquoise water on a warm summer afternoon.
Achrainer has been staying at hotels like this one since she was evicted from her house in late May. Her new position as manager of the legendary Hotel Fafleralp, which is situated atop a mountain overlooking Blatten village, had just started. She and her staff were getting ready for the season’s first visitors when all of a sudden the employees began to flee.
“They shouted, ‘We have to go now!’ and I thought, ‘Why? What? How?’,” before they literally hopped in their cars and drove off. “I was like, ‘What’s going on?'” remembers Achrainer.
Unbeknownst to the untrained eye, the picturesque Birch Glacier was in motion across the valley from the hotel on a peak rising over Blatten. Scientists quickly convinced the local government to evacuate the 300 residents of the village as it began to slide down the mountain more quickly than it had in decades.
As expected, the glacier melted a week later. The glacier crashes down the sheer mountainside in a spectacular white cloud of ice, rock, and sand, as captured on camera by visitor Vitus Brenner. The hotel above the valley was where Achrainer was working when the lights flickered and went out. To find out what had happened, she ventured outdoors and hiked to a nearby cliff.
“It was beyond imagination,” she claims. “There is a village, but it is not there. In essence, it’s a heap of rocks, mud, and sand. This is where the village is supposed to be, so you can’t relate to that. “,”.
In an instant, Blatten’s town hall, church, and residences were buried.
After years of monitoring the Birch Glacier, glaciologist Daniel Farinotti of the public university ETH Zurich says, “An event of that size is certainly nothing I’ve seen in Switzerland before — not in the recent past.”.
Farinotti poses the $1 million query, “Did Blatten occur as a result of climate change?”. And it’s really hard to determine causality for a single event, so that’s a really tough question to answer. We can observe that this process chain contained components that might be connected to climate change. “.
continent with the fastest rate of warming.
For more than ten years, Farinotti and his colleagues at ETH had noticed a rise in rockfall from the glacier, a phenomenon he believes was brought on by recent warming in the Alps. The rate of temperature increase in Europe is double that of the rest of the world. Additionally, over the past century, the ice on the Swiss Alps glaciers has decreased by almost two-thirds.
For years, Farinotti has been researching these quick changes. Switzerland’s glaciers lost half of their volume between 1931 and 2016, according to his team at ETH Zurich. However, they lost an extra 12 percent of their ice in just the following six years.
Farinotti guides a group of his students up the pockmarked, filthy ice of the Rhone Glacier, the source of the Rhone River that flows to France, while donning crampons, a harness, and a backpack full of monitoring gear. One by one, they cautiously jump over craters whose frozen depths emit blue light and the sound of melting water reverberating through a system of caverns and fissures below.
They pause to erect a monitoring station to measure the rate of glacier melting. Farinotti looks at the granite mountainside that rises more than 500 feet on either side of the ice as his team sets up a pole with a solar panel and a GPS receiver. According to him, the glacier was flush with those ridges in 1850. It has melted considerably more quickly in the last ten years, though, as Farinotti notes that the data his team has gathered thus far demonstrates a sharp decline in the Rhone Glacier’s ice cover year after year.
He claims, “We are losing several meters of ice a year where we are standing.”. “It’s about dozens of meters long every year, and maybe 5 or 6 meters thick. Each year, that amounts to 2, 3, and 4 percent of the glacier. “..”.
At that rate, we will reach a very warm climate, according to Farinotti, “if we continue on the current course.”. He states matter-of-factly, “And that would mean that this glacier disappears later this century.”. Therefore, there wouldn’t be any ice left by 2100. “.
Glaciers, according to Farinotti, are “nature’s water towers.”. In the hot and dry summer months, the water that has been stored for centuries replaces springtime snowmelt and rainfall as it flows down Europe’s largest rivers.
He explains, “If you imagine a very hot, dry summer in a catchment or area with glaciers, you will get water because the glaciers are melting.”. “You don’t get a droplet if you go to the same place and remove the glacier during a hot, dry summer. Thus, the water’s arrival time will alter. This is what’s causing the worry. “,”.
The Rhine, Danube, and Po—the largest rivers on the continent—all have their origins in glaciers in the Swiss Alps, making the Rhone not the only river to do so. Furthermore, according to Farinotti, these rivers will change irrevocably once these glaciers disappear.
Getting ready to live without glaciers.
Steffen Bauer leans over the rail of a tugboat to check the depth of the river hundreds of miles downstream from the Alps. Here, a huge digital sign in red neon reads “250cm” in Duisburg, a port city in western Germany on the lower reaches of the Rhine River. “So the normal water level is around 3 meters 50 [centimeters], and now we are 1 meter less compared to the normal situation,” he says, an expression on his face.
Bauer is the CEO of HGK Shipping, which constructs barges that transport various commodities up and down the Rhine, Germany’s primary economic transportation route. He claims that the Rhine has experienced record-low depth levels in recent years due to the late summer months. He claims that the low water situation was always present and was also in the past. However, the issue is that [now] it stands longer, and we are in this predicament for a longer time. Thus, it now lasts for two, three, or even four months, particularly in the late summer, which has a significant effect. “,”.
In the hot, dry summer of 2018, the water level on the Rhine River was so low that barges could no longer navigate the river. Bauer began to consider how Germany constructs its barges as a result. “Every barge had substantial construction to carry the maximum amount of cargo. We have to reconsider that now,” Bauer says.
Bauer’s engineers have been working diligently since the 2018 drought to create a fleet of low-water barges that can move up to 600 metric tons of cargo in just 1.2 meters, or slightly more than 3 feet, of water. However, he notes that it will take some time for an industry that only produces a hundred barges annually to adapt to these new water levels.
Glaciers are the poster child for climate change.
Back on the Rhone Glacier, the team led by glaciologist Farinotti is getting ready to measure the rate at which water is evaporating. With a bottle of the solution in hand, Michelle Dreifuss explains, “First we put a salt dilution in the stream there and then we have two measuring points where we measure the salt concentration. With that, we can examine how much water is coming in a time period.”. “.
Additionally, Dreifuss uses a colored dye as a visual component to test the water flow. As soon as it is poured in, the glacial stream turns a vivid pink and flows over a waterfall before the bubblegum-colored cascade vanishes into a crevasse. For visiting photographers, it’s an eye-catching feature, but for Farinotti, the more startling sights come year after year as the glacier disappears from view.
Farinotti claims that because glaciers are so effective at illustrating the changes, they have taken on a symbolic role in the fight against climate change. The term “climate change” refers to a one-degree increase in the average global temperature. What does that entail? Do you feel the need to raise the temperature in your home by one degree? Well, perhaps. You don’t have to be a scientist to realize that a glacier has changed significantly if you look at what happens when it warms by one degree. “..”.
According to him, it’s a significant shift that will affect rivers, the ecosystem, and all of Europe in a cascade of ways.
Reporting from Berlin was done by Esme Nicholson.
