CNN/AP: Shrinking Alpine glacier points to snowless future

[DeepModem Mom]

Shrinking Alpine glacier points to snowless future
Tuesday, May 2, 2006


The colossal sweep of the Aletsch glacier, a remnant of the last Ice Age. This river of ice has retreated 2.1 miles.

ON THE ALETSCH GLACIER, Switzerland (AP) -- It's cold in the snow up at 6,500 feet, even with sunshine pouring down from almost cloudless skies.....

****

Yet looking over the colossal sweep of the Aletsch glacier, a remnant of the last Ice Age snaking down through a deep valley below the peaks of the Bernese Oberland, the picture appears far different -- and warmer.

The river of ice has retreated 2.1 miles since peaking at a length of 14 miles in 1860, estimates Hanspeter Holzhauser, a geographer at the University of Zurich who studies the Aletsch glacier region. Not quite half of the shrinkage has happened just since 1950.

A bare expanse of jumbled rocks and boulders stretches where the tongue of ice mass used to be. And the glacier will shrink more -- even if temperatures should stay at current levels -- because the warming of the last few decades has yet to take full effect, Holzhauser said....

***

"We have to fight really to keep a landscape as it was made by nature," said Bruno Messerli, a geographer who also studies the mountains around the Aletsch, which is a UNESCO-designated world heritage site....Trends don't bode well for Switzerland's ski resorts, which have been seeing shorter seasons. Average temperatures in the Alps are at their highest since 1500, which many experts blame partly on the burning of fossil fuels increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere....

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science/05/02/vanishing.glacier.ap/index.html