Consequences of global warming in the Alps

Zürich - Alpine glaciers lost ten percent of their volume in the hot summer of 2003, claim researchers from the University of Zurich; today only between half and a third of the volume from the 1850s remains. Further atmospheric warming by three degrees Celsius could cause 80 percent of the glacial ice to disappear by the end of the century. This could threaten life and tourism in this European mountain range. Rising temperatures are at least partly the reason why five million tons of rock are slowly sliding from one of the most famous Swiss peaks, the approximately 4,000-meter-high Eiger, whose infamous north face has claimed the lives of many who tried to conquer it. This very spectacle of nature below the Eiger is attracting more and more visitors. Hansrüdi Burgener, who owns a mountain hut opposite the sliding rock, receives up to 800 visitors a day, twice as many as usual. Everyone hopes to witness the collapse of the cliff. It won't happen that quickly yet, although every few minutes a loud cracking can be heard, accompanied by a cloud of dust. The rock mass initially moved a meter per day, now its speed has slowed. No one can yet predict when it will slide down the slope.
The thundering spectacle of nature warns that the Alps have also been strongly affected by global warming on Earth and that experts' warnings about the melting of perennial ice and the frozen soil within it, which hold the mountains together, are not pulled out of thin air. In the future, all these factors will leave even greater consequences in the mountain world, including many occasionally horrific accidents among mountaineers, which experts attribute to increasingly unstable conditions in higher altitudes and on mountain ridges. As geologist Hans Rudolf Keusen, who was called in by the company Geotest to monitor the sliding of the Eiger, explains, he is more cautious in giving assessments and emphasizes that the Alps will not disintegrate so quickly. Large rocks have crumbled in the Alps even before the Earth's atmosphere began to warm. As early as 1806, a large mass near Mount Rigi, 20 times larger than the one mentioned on the Eiger, buried 457 people beneath it, erased the village of Goldau from the map, and entered history as one of the greatest natural disasters in Switzerland. As Keusen emphasizes, in Switzerland on average every 20 to 50 years a rock larger than one million cubic meters breaks off.

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