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Outside Magazine December 2003

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The Hard Way
Fire and Ice (cont.)

"THE WORLD'S CLIMATE is getting warmer," Professor Andy Kääb, a glaciologist at the University of Zurich's World Glacier Monitoring Service, tells me. "There has been a one- to two-degree-centigrade increase in the past century, and much of this occurred in the past 50 years."

What's a couple degrees? Plenty. It turns out the alpine glaciers in Europe and the Himalayas, as well as most in North and South America, are "temperate"—the ice hovers right at freezing—and are therefore extremely sensitive to changes in temperature. The air warms just a degree or two and it's like moving an ice cube from the freezer into the fridge: It'll melt—slowly but surely.

Alpine glaciers are sensitive to temperature changes. The air warms a degree or two, and they'll start melting, slowly but surely.

"Glaciers in the Alps are receding at unprecedented rates," says Kääb, his office walls papered with grainy satellite images of the world's glaciers. "We have also documented dramatic down-wasting"—a shrinking of ice thickness—"of the large glaciers. At the present rate of global warming, it is probable that all the small glaciers in the Alps will disappear entirely in the next 100 years."

Within 20 years, he predicts, the Alps' few remaining summer ski areas will likely close, as will many low-elevation winter ski areas. Only the upper reaches of the larger winter ski areas will have dependable natural snow; and base lodges and lifts built on present-day permafrost will begin to collapse. Climbing routes and their approaches will continue to change, rendering older guidebooks frustratingly inadequate at best, dangerously inaccurate at worst. Meltwater will increase, swelling rivers and temporarily generating abundant hydropower. The permafrost line will rise, unleashing ice avalanches and landslides. Glacial lakes—water where there used to be ice, held in place only by loose terminal moraines—will burst their tenuous natural dams and flood the valleys below. Dozens of towns and cities in Europe lie in the line of fire.

"The Alps as we know them," Kääb says, "are disintegrating before our eyes."

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