Fast Dying glaciers draw curious to Swiss Alpine peaks
Pastor Dale Morgan
Fast Dying glaciers draw curious to Swiss Alpine peaks*
By Laura MacInnis
Reuters
Friday, September 15, 2006; 5:38 AM
INSIDE THE RHONE GLACIER, Switzerland (Reuters) - Tourists are flocking
to Switzerland's highest peaks to see formidable Alpine glaciers melt
away before their eyes -- and sometimes, onto their heads.
Emerging from a 100-metre-deep (300 feet) tunnel dug into the Rhone
Glacier, the source of the Rhone River that flows to Geneva and through
France, Mark Scheibner of New Jersey said concern about climate change
had spurred his interest.
"It is shrinking quickly, just as we are standing here," the 48-year-old
said, drops of water falling above him from the ice grotto's translucent
entryway. "If anything, it makes me want to bring my daughter here to
see it as soon as I can."
While it is hardly unusual for ice to melt in the summer sun, scientists
are concerned that a heating-up of the world's atmosphere is causing
Europe's glaciers to steadily disappear.
Swiss glaciers have lost more than 15 percent of their surface area in
the last two decades, and could vanish almost entirely within a century
if climate shifts are not moderated, said Max Maisch, a glaciologist
from the University of Zurich.
As one of the only glaciers in Europe accessible by car, and with its
man-made grotto that lets visitors walk underneath the ice mass, the
Rhone Glacier has drawn many visitors looking to see for themselves how
global warming is felt in the mountains.
"Tourists can observe a dying glacier here," Maisch said, standing next
to the blue-tinged ice that once stretched a further 1.5 kilometers (1
mile) into the valley below.
No precise figures are available on how many people visit Switzerland's
glaciers every year, because most are accessed and viewed freely, said
Veronique Kanel of the Swiss tourist board.
QUANTUM CHANGES
But hundreds of thousands of people traveled on trains leading to Swiss
glacier sites last year, she said, including 23,000 to the Rhone glacier
and 562,000 on the Jungfrau railway line leading to the Aletsch glacier,
the largest in the Alps.
Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment
Programme (UNEP), said Europe's melting glaciers provided a clear
illustration of the dangers caused by carbon dioxide emissions from cars
and industry.
"What we are seeing is stark. It is a reminder of the kind of quantum
changes that we are about to witness as a consequence of global
warming," he told Reuters in a telephone interview from UNEP's
headquarters in Nairobi.
"The worrying part of it is not just that the glacier disappears. It is
a chain reaction, and we still lack the capacity to understand the full
consequence of these changes," he said.
Curt Bolliger, a 75-year-old Swiss national who lives in Mexico, first
visited the Rhone Glacier in 1950.
"I was here many years ago, and you can be sure that it was a different
place then. The ice went down, down, down. Now it is melting all over,"
he said after walking through the ice tunnel with his wife and daughter.
Recalling seeing the glacial ice stretch hundreds of meters further
toward the nearby Gletsch village, Bolliger said he considered its
disappearance highly disheartening.
"If we don't change anything about the ecology, and the world weather,
our future generations will have lost a lot."