Pure ice: it’s never-ending. You can see for kilometers into the distance, with mountains as high as 4,000m on either side.
Walking on the Aletsch Glacier, you take 10 steps but you never see yourself advancing. Everything is on such a massive scale it’s hard to gauge your progress.
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The Great Aletsch is among Europe's biggest glaciers, coiling 23 km through the Swiss Alps. Despite its size and majesty, this mighty river of ice could almost vanish in the lifetimes of people born today because of climate change.
The glacier is 900 metres thick at one point. But it’s retreated about 3 km since 1870 and that pace is quickening, as with many other glaciers around the globe. The melting ice is feeding more water into the oceans and raising world sea levels.
It was only after I got down onto the ice, with spikes on my boots for grip and often roped to my guide for safety, that I appreciated the full scale of the glacier.
We could walk for an hour and not seem to advance. The vast field of ice snakes its way downhill striped by debris and rocks, scarred by crevasses and hemmed in by towering mountain peaks.
And yet even the Great Aletsch glacier, the biggest in the Alps and visible from space, is under threat from the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere from factories, power plants and cars that are blamed for global warming.
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Andreas Vieli, a professor who heads the University of Zurich's group of glaciology experts, said the Aletsch may lose 90 percent of its ice volume by 2100, with the lower reaches melting away.
"My kids are going to see a very different scenery in the Alps," he said.