Shocking photos of Swiss glaciers reveal how ice has nearly disappeared since 1800s
SHOCKING photos reveal the extent to which Swiss glaciers have vanished due to global warming.
Snapped more than 100 years apart from locations in the Alps, the pictures show how the once mighty ice bodies have retreated since the Victorian era.
Where huge glaciers once spilled into Swiss valleys like rivers of ice, a residue of boulders and meandering streams remains.
A Reuters montage of images - showing photos of modern-day mountain landscapes next to archive shots of the same scenes decades earlier - reveals the dramatic change.
More than 500 Swiss glaciers have already vanished, and its government says 90 per cent of the remaining 1,500 will go by the end of the century if nothing is done to cut emissions.
Their retreat is expected to have a major impact on water levels - possibly raising them initially as the ice melts but depleting them long term.
Officials fear the changes could trigger rockfalls and other hazards and affect the economy.
The Belvedere Hotel, built in the 1880s during a surge in Alpine tourists, was an early victim of the decline.
Once the scene of wild parties, it features in a James Bond car chase in "Goldfinger".
Visitors can still walk into a cave carved into the glacier. But the ice above is now draped with huge white sheets to reflect the sun's heat.
Despite such efforts, melt waters have formed a green lake.
Down the valley, a mid 19th century photograph shows the glacier's bulging snout more than 100 metres thick.
Now, animals graze and a river meanders on the same spot.
In another archive photograph taken in the late 19th century in front of the Aletsch glacier - the largest in the Alps - a man sits on a boulder in front of a huge ice channel that merges with the main ice stream below.
Today, they no longer join.
Landlocked Switzerland is warming at twice the global rate and over the last year its glaciers have lost 2 per cent of volume, said Mathias Huss, who heads Switzerland's glacier monitoring institute GLAMOS which has data stretching back 150 years.
"We have never seen such a fast rate of glacial decline since the measurements have started," he said.
Climate change explained
Here are the basic facts...
- Scientists have lots of evidence to show that the Earth’s climate is rapidly changing due to human activity
- Climate change will result in problems like global warming, greater risk of flooding, droughts and regular heatwaves
- Each of the last three decades have been hotter than the previous one and 17 of the 18 warmest years on record have happened during the 21st century
- The Earth only needs to increase by a few degrees for it to spell disaster
- The oceans are already warming, polar ice and glaciers are melting, sea levels are rising and we’re seeing more extreme weather events
- In 2015, almost all of the world's nations signed a deal called the Paris Agreement which set out ways in which they could tackle climate change and try to keep temperatures below 2C
Some hope that politics can make a difference, especially after the Greens surged in an October election.
The "Glacier Initiative" calling for more climate measures collected more than the 100,000 signatures required to trigger a referendum and will be sent to Bern this week.
But the glaciers will keep shrinking, scientists say.
"The Alps will still be beautiful in my opinion, but they will be different," Huss said.
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In other news, one mad scientist recently claimed the climate crisis could be solved by eating human corpses.
Seaside towns were recently urged by experts to "move inland" as climate change now means a retreat is needed.
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