The Effects of Melting Glaciers in Europe

0:00Today on State of the World, the effects of melting glaciers in Europe.

0:08You'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. Europe is the world's fastest warming continent. Temperatures there are increasing at twice the average global rate. And that is causing knock-on effects downstream. Like, literally downstream. The Swiss Alps have lost nearly two-thirds of their ice throughout the past century. And as they disappear, Europe's biggest rivers are losing a crucial source of their summer water flow. And that's affecting shipping. And PR's Rob Schmitz takes us to the Swiss Alps to understand the changes taking place.

0:49We begin our story in Lucerne, Switzerland. Barbara Ochreiner sips a latte on her hotel's veranda along a busy lakeside boulevard. It's a warm summer afternoon. The hot air over the turquoise water forms a haze that silhouettes the Alps in the distance. Hochreiner'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 new job as manager of the storied Hotel Farfa Elp, 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.

1:27Just before lunchtime, we got the short information through people, locals that were actually working in the hotel, saying, oh, the road's going to be closed. We need to leave right now. And 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, as these scientists predicted, the glacier broke loose and came crashing down.

2:12Video shot by a local man shows a dramatic white cloud of ice, rock, and sand rushing down the steep mountainside across the valley. Hochreiner says she was working in a 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. Of that size is certainly nothing I've seen in Switzerland before, kind of not in the recent past.

3:00Daniel Farinotti is a glaciologist at the public university ETH Zurich. The$1 million question is, did that happen because of climate change? And that's a super difficult question to answer because pinpointing such a causality for a single event, that is very difficult. 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 increased rockfall from the glacier for more than a decade, a phenomenon he suspects was caused by warmer temperatures in the Alps. Farinotti's been studying these rapid changes for years.

3:39According to his team at ETH Zurich, glaciers in Switzerland lost half their volume between 1931 and 2016, and they're shrinking even more rapidly in the past several years.

3:54Wearing crampons, a harness, and a backpack full of monitoring equipment, Farnotti leads a team of his students up the pockmarked dirty ice of the Rhone Glacier, the source of the Rhone River which flows to France. He and his team carefully leap over crevasses whose icy depths emanate blue light and the echoes of meltwater flowing through a network of cracks and caverns below. They stop to set up a monitoring station that'll track how quickly this glacier is melting. Farnati puts his backpack down, dislodging his water bottle.

4:34As his team erects a pole with a GPS receiver and a solar panel, Farnati peers at the granite mountainsides, looming more than 500 feet high on either side of the ice. In 1850, the glacier was flush with these ridges, he says. In the past decade, though, it's melted much faster. Farnotti says the data his team has collected so far shows a stark year-by-year reduction of ice in the Rhone glacier. 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 Farenotti...

5:15If 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 in the late century. So by 2100, you wouldn't find any ice anymore. Farenotti 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. If you think of a catchment, so an area where you have a glacier and you envisage a very dry, hot summer, well, you will get water because the glacier is melting. If you go to the same area and remove the glacier, well, in a very dry, hot summer, you don't get a droplet.

5:57So the timing at which water will come will change, and this is what the concern is about. The Rhône isn't the only river that begins from a glacier here in the Alps. The Rhine, the Danube, the Po, the continent's biggest rivers all start here. And when these glaciers are gone, Farnotti says, these rivers will be forever altered. Hundreds of miles downstream from the Alps, Stefan Bauer leans over the rail of a tugboat to check the river's depth. Here in Duisburg, a port on the lower reaches of the Rhine River, a massive digital sign reads 250 centimeters in big red numbers. That's a little more than eight feet.

6:37So the normal water level is, I think it's normally around 3 meter, 3 meter 50. And now we are 1 meter less compared to the normal situation. Bauer is CEO of HGK Shipping, which builds barges that carry all sorts of goods up and down the Rhine, the main artery of Germany's economy. Bauer says in recent years, the late summer months have met record low depth levels on the Rhine. 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. So it's now more between two, three, up to four months, especially in the late summer.

7:19And 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 got Bauer thinking about the way Germany builds its barges. So in the past they were built in a way that you can load the maximum tonnage, which means that all our barges that are now operating here on the rivers in Europe are heavy, so that they allow us to transport the maximum capacity. So now we have to rethink that. Bauer's engineers have designed a fleet of low-water barges that can transport up to 600 tons of goods in just 1.2 meters, or just over three feet of water.

8:02Bauer's team is working hard to build 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 Farinotti's team is preparing to test how fast water is flowing off the glacier. Michelle Dreyfus holds a container at the ready. First of all, we put a salt dilution into the stream here, and then we have two measuring points where we measure the salt concentration. And with that, we can examine how much water is coming during this time period. Dreyfus also adds a visual element to test the water flow, a colored dye.

8:46Within seconds of pouring it in, the glacial stream turns bright pink, flowing over a waterfall where the neon cascade disappears into a crevasse. It's a striking visual element, but for Farnati, the more striking visuals can be seen year to year as the glacier recedes before his eyes. Glaciers have become a bit of a symbol of climate change just because they are so powerful in visualizing the change. You know, when we talk climate change, we are talking about one degree of warming of global average temperatures. I mean, what does that mean? And if you think of heating up your house one degree more, I mean, do you feel it?

9:25Well, maybe. But if you look at what one degree of warming does to a glacier, I mean, you don't need to be a scientist to figure out, whoa, that's a big change. A big change, he says, that will have a cascade of consequences on rivers, on the ecosystem, and on all of us. Rob Schmidt, in Per News, the Rhône Glacier, Switzerland.

9:54That's the State of the World from NPR. Thanks for listening.