In yet another sign of how quickly global warming is eating away at glaciers in the European Alps, the Austrian Alpine Club is reporting that the summit cross high on the 3,660-meter Grossvenediger in Austria came close to toppling off its podium this summer.
The permanent snow and ice that helped hold the monument in place for decades melted away in the summer heat, with several feet of ice vanishing just in the past few months. A mountain guide arriving at the summit last week discovered that the cross was close to falling over, with potential risks to summit visitors.
A mountain rescue crew and other workers temporarily re-anchored the cross to the remaining ice with steel cables, but later decided to take it down once again. It will be remounted on solid rock.
Austrian media is reporting that, up until very recently, it would have been impossible to use the bare rocks at the summit as an anchor point. The permanent snow and ice that has covered the mountain’s peak for at least a century has just vanished within the past few weeks, according to Friedl Steiner, head of the local rescue group, who attributed the melting to climate change.
The U.S. Geological Survey has documented shrinking and vanishing ice fields in the Rocky Mountains with this extraordinary photo project.
Global warming deniers will try to tell you that glaciers have been melting since the end of the last ice age, but the rate of melting at most glaciers now far exceeds the background rate that could be expected as part of natural climate variations.
Glacier melting has accelerated in the European Alps since 1980, and 10 to 20 percent of glacier ice in the Alps has been lost in less than two decades. Half the volume of Europe’s Alpine glaciers has disappeared since 1850.
Thinning and melting rates in Alaskan glaciers have more than doubled just in the past 10 years.
African glaciers have declined by 60 to 70 percent since the 1900s, and most Pacific glaciers have also declined, with the exception of some of New Zealand’s ice fields, where increased precipitation has helped boost glacier growth.
Bob Berwyn is Editor of the Summit County Citizens Voice. This piece was originally published at the Citizens Voice and was reprinted with permission.