Consequences of the climate crisis: A glacier like a cemetery

The thickness of the ice on the Rhone Glacier has decreased by at least three meters in recent weeks. Researchers are primarily concerned with what is happening in the depths of the glacier.

It’s dripping in the ice grotto on the Rhone Glacier – just a few hundred meters away from the Furka Pass road. “Nowhere else in Europe can you drive so close to a glacier,” says the tourist attraction’s website. The ice tunnel has been cut into the glacier every year since the late 19th century. It’s “blue, cold and fascinating,” says a tourist.

The ice spectacle does not look fascinating, but rather sad from the outside. Because the grotto still exists at all is due to the large textile tarps that were used to cover the lower end of the glacier. The cloths hang over the ice like sad ghosts. And yet we could not prevent a large chunk from coming loose this summer. It is now floating, together with its gray textile cover, on the glacial lake that was formed 15 years ago and is getting bigger every year.

The winter had little snow

Mylène Jacquemart describes the sight as bizarre. It all reminds you of a cemetery. There was something spooky about the towels. “In terms of glacier technology, it makes no difference that we still keep some ice here,” she says. Jacquemart is a glacier researcher at ETH Zurich. She is part of a team that has been monitoring, measuring and researching the melting of the Rhone Glacier for many years.

Your colleague Andreas Bauder is on his way to the measuring poles at the bottom of the glacier. The ice is disappearing particularly rapidly there. The thickness of the ice has decreased by at least three meters in the past few weeks alone, says Andreas Bauder – a predictable consequence of the lack of snow in the winter and the heat of the summer.

A funnel has formed

However, the scientists are also observing a new phenomenon: a kind of funnel has formed in the lower area of ​​the Rhone Glacier, which from a distance looks like a large circle in the dirty gray ice. “We suspect that a cave has formed under the glacier. The ice cover has therefore become very thin and is sinking in,” says Bauder.

The ETH team drilled a hole in the ice to use pressure and temperature sensors, as well as a camera, to understand what exactly is going on in the depths of the melting glacier. “The main glacial stream comes through down here,” explains Jacquemart. This would melt the glacier from below – a cavern was created. “The surface is now thin enough that it’s starting to collapse.”

“We’re still groping in the dark”

The glacial collapse on the Marmolada in Italy in early summer showed how immediately threatening the increasingly rapid melt is. Eleven people died. Jacquemart specializes in glacier hazards. The glacier in the Dolomites literally exploded away, says the researcher. “But we still have a very poor understanding of the processes behind it.”

The meltwater certainly plays a role, she suspects. If there were more of them in the systems, such crashes could also occur more frequently. “But we’re still groping in the dark as to when and where glaciers could be affected,” says Jacquemart.

There is no doubt about the cause of the glacier melt: man-made climate change, against which no towels over a tourist ice grotto help. Researcher Jacquemart sees the only solution to reducing CO2 emissions to preserve glaciers. “It’s highest ice rink.”