Looking Back: The Effects of Melting Glaciers in Europe

0:01Today on State of the World, the effects of melting glaciers in Europe. You're listening to State of the World from NPR. We bring you the day's most vital international stories up close where they're happening. I'm Greg Dixon. As we say goodbye to 2025, we're looking back at some of our favorite international stories of the last year. NPR Berlin correspondent Rob Schmitz, what's your most memorable story of the year? My memorable story of the year has to be the story that I did about Europe's rivers and how they're going to, in the future, be much lower because of the loss of glaciers in the Alps.

0:42And I think it's memorable because I actually had a chance to go up with a team of glaciologists on top of a glacier. We all were outfitted with crampons, harnesses, ice axes, and we were there in August. And as we will soon hear, you'll hear a lot of melting water because when we were up there, it was not only raining, But underneath us, there were all of these sort of rivulets and crevasses that you could peer down into, and some of them went way, way down, where there was just constant running water. You were just constantly hearing this glacier literally melt. And it was both a visual and an aural phenomenon.

1:28It was really interesting. Let's take a listen to your story about Europe's disappearing rivers. Barbara Ochreiner sips a latte on a hotel veranda along a busy lakeside boulevard in Lucerne. The hot air over the turquoise water forms a haze that silhouettes the Alps in the distance. Ochreiner's moved from hotel to hotel like this one since late May, when she was forced out of her home. She had just begun a job as a manager of the storied Hotel Fafael, perched along a mountainside above the village of Blaten. She and her crew were preparing for their first guests of the season when suddenly her workers started running for the exits.

2:06And they really literally jumped into the car and left. And I was like, what's going on? On a peak towering over Blatton sits the Birch Glacier. Scientists observing it noticed it was starting to slide down the mountain much faster than it usually does, on a trajectory so dangerous that they persuaded the local government to immediately evacuate the village's 300 people. A week later, the glacier broke loose and came crashing down.

2:38Video shot by a local man shows a white cloud of ice, rock, and sand crashing down the steep mountainside across the valley. Achreiner was working in the hotel above the valley when the landslide hit. The lights flickered and went dark. She went outside and hiked to a nearby cliff to see what had happened. It's beyond imagination. It's something that, you know, you know the village is there, but there is no village. It's just basically a pile of mud and sand and rocks. The church, town hall, all of the village's homes, buried in an instant. An event of that size is certainly nothing I've seen in Switzerland before, kind of not in the recent past.

3:25Daniel Farinotti is a glaciologist at the public university ETH Zurich. The$1 million question is, did that happen because of climate change? What we can say is that there were elements in this process chain that may well be related to climate change. Farinotti and his team at ETH had observed an uptick in rockfall from the glacier for more than a decade. He suspects it was caused by warmer temperatures. He's been studying these changes for years. According to his team at ETH Zurich, glaciers in Switzerland lost half their volume between 1931 and 2016. And now, he says, they're shrinking even more rapidly.

4:12Wearing crampons, a harness, and a backpack full of monitoring equipment, Farinotti leads a team of students up the pockmarked dirty ice of the Rhone glacier, the source of the Rhone River, which flows to France. They carefully leap over crevasses whose icy depths emanate blue light and the echoes of meltwater flowing through a network of cracks and caverns below.

4:39As his team erects a pole with a GPS receiver and a solar panel, Tharanotti peers at the granite mountainsides looming more than 500 feet high on either side of the ice. In 1850, the glacier was flush with those ridges, he says. In the past decade, though, Faranotti says it's melted much faster. Where we are standing, we're losing several meters of ice a year, maybe five, six, kind of in thickness. And then in terms of length, that's typically two, three, four percent, depending on the year. And at that rate, says Faranotti. If we stay on track with the climate we have at the moment, that brings us to a very warm climate, and that would mean that this glacier disappears kind of the late century.

5:24So by 2100, you wouldn't find any ice anymore. Faronotti says glaciers are nature's water towers. The water they've stored for centuries flows down Europe's biggest rivers during the hot and dry summer months, replacing rainwater and snowmelt from the spring. And the Rhône isn't the only river whose source is a glacier. The Rhine, the Danube, the Po, the continent's biggest rivers all start here. And when these glaciers are gone, Faronotti says, these rivers will be forever altered. Hundreds of miles downstream from the Alps, Steffen Bauer leans over the rail of a tugboat to check the river's depth.

6:01Here in Duisburg, a port on the lower reaches of the Rhine River, a massive digital sign reads 250 centimeters in big red numbers, a little more than eight feet. So the normal water level is, I think it's normally around 3 meter, 3 meter 50. And now we are one meter less compared to the normal situation. Bauer is CEO of HGK Shipping. He says in recent years, the late summer months have met record low depth levels on the Rhine, the main artery of Germany's economy. So low water situation was also in the past. It was always there. But the problem is it stands longer. So for a longer period, we are in this situation.

6:44So it's now more between two, three, up to four months, especially in the late summer. And that's then a huge impact. In the hot, dry summer of 2018, the water level was so low that barges could no longer navigate the river. That spurred Bauer and his engineers to design a fleet of low-water barges that can transport up to 600 tons of goods in just over three feet of water. Bauer's team is constructing as many as they can. But in an industry that builds just 100 barges a year, he says it'll take a while to adjust to these new water levels. Back on the Rhone Glacier, glaciologist Daniel Faranotti's team is preparing to test how fast water is flowing off the glacier.

7:25They add a visual element to test the water flow, a colored dye. Within seconds of pouring it in, the glacial stream turns bright pink, flowing over a waterfall where the neon cascade disappears into a cravass. It makes for a good photo, but for Faranotti, the more striking visuals can be seen year year as the glacier recedes before his eyes. When we talk climate change, we are talking about one degree of warming of global average temperatures. I mean, what does that mean? If you think of heating up your house one degree more, I mean, do you feel it? Well, maybe. But if you look at what one degree of warming does to a glacier, I mean, you know, you don't need to be a scientist to figure out, whoa, that's a big change.

8:10A big change, he says, that will have a cascade of consequences on rivers, on the ecosystem, and on all of us. Rob Schmitz, NPR News, the Rhone Glacier, Switzerland.

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