“It’s very fast. We are confronted with the reality of the retreat,” says glaciologist Luc Moreau about the rapidly vanishing ice at France’s biggest glacier. We are looking at the unmistakeable fingerprint of climate change as told by the historical photos hanging in a hotel overlooking the Mer de Glace, the “sea of ice” near the Alps’ highest summit, Mont Blanc, reports The New Scientist.
About a century ago, women with boaters and parasols sat near the Montenvers train station above the glacier, which then was almost level with a tongue of jagged ice snaking into the distance. Today, visitors are greeted by a slightly sad and largely grey glacier that is about 100 metres lower.
From the station, a short trip by cable car takes me to the height where, in 1988, a visitor could descend down three steps to reach the glacier. There are 580 steps down to the glacier now. Of these, 80 were added this year – a stark illustration of the accelerating effects of global warming.
The fate of the world’s glaciers will be laid bare by the UN climate science panel on September 25th, just days after research is expected to confirm that the extent of Arctic sea ice this summer reached the second lowest level ever recorded.
There are some 170,000 glaciers worldwide covering an area of about 730,000 square kilometres. Monitoring of 500 glaciers globally shows they are retreating across the board and, since 1960, the rate at which they are losing ice has increased. A leaked draft of a report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on our planet’s oceans and ice warns that, this century, melting glaciers will “first give too much water and then too little”.
Many places mentioned in the IPCC report will seem remote to some people, but the Mer de Glace and nearby Argentière glacier are in the heart of Europe, next to Chamonix, a holiday destination visited by millions every year.
Tourists can see the effects clearly. The steps down to the Mer de Glace are punctuated by “level of the glacier” signs from 1985 through to 2015, the year the world agreed the Paris accord to avert dangerous global warming.
At the ice cave carved in the glacier, white sheets have been laid atop the ice to slow the melting. Sébastien Payot tells me he is running out of ways to adapt. Since 1946, his family’s business has carved a cave here for tourists every year. But this year, the diggers encountered a spit of rock, indicating that they are nearing the bottom of the glacier. He fears that the ice’s retreat means next year’s cave will be the last. “It’s a barometer of global warming,” he says.