Sweden's Highest Mountain Now Its 2nd-Highest After Melting Lowers Glacier On Peak
The mountain peak known to Swedes as their country’s highest can no longer lay claim to the title due to global heating, scientists have confirmed, as the glacier at its summit shrinks amid soaring Arctic temperatures.
“This is quite a symbol,” said Gunhild Ninis Rosqvist, a Stockholm University geography professor who has been measuring the glacier annually for several years. “A very obvious, very clear signal to everyone in Sweden that things are changing.”
In the far north of Sweden, about 95 miles (150km) inside the Arctic circle, Kebnekaise has two peaks: a southern, glacier-covered summit accessible to suitably equipped hikers, and a northern neighbour that is free of ice but reserved for experienced mountaineers.
Since they were first measured in 1880, the southern peak has been the higher. But when Ninis Rosqvist and her team took this year’s measurements, at the end of the summer melt on 3 September, the northern peak was 1.2 metres higher at 2,096.8 metres. “We suspected this was probably the case last year,” Ninis Rosqvist told the Guardian from the Tarfala research station at the foot of the massif. “But unfortunately our measurements were not precise enough. Now we can say with certainty: we are accurate to within a couple of centimetres.”
EDIT
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/06/sweden-kebnekaise-mountain-loses-highest-peak-title-global-heating