Earthprints: Aletsch Glacier

Earthprints: Aletsch Glacier

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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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. Fiesch, Switzerland. Reuters/Denis Balibouse
. Konkordia, Switzerland. Reuters/Denis Balibouse
. Fiesch, Switzerland. Reuters/Denis Balibouse
. Konkordia, Switzerland. Reuters/Denis Balibouse
. Konkordia, Switzerland. Reuters/Denis Balibouse
. Fiesch, Switzerland. Reuters/Denis Balibouse
. Fiesch, Switzerland. Reuters/Denis Balibouse
. Fiesch, Switzerland. Reuters/Denis Balibouse
. Fiesch, Switzerland. Reuters/Denis Balibouse
. Fiesch, Switzerland. Reuters/Denis Balibouse
. Fiesch, Switzerland. Reuters/Denis Balibouse
. Fiesch, Switzerland. Reuters/Denis Balibouse
. Konkordia, Switzerland. Reuters/Denis Balibouse
. Fiesch, Switzerland. Reuters/Denis Balibouse
. Fiesch, Switzerland. Reuters/Denis Balibouse
. Konkordia, Switzerland. Reuters/Denis Balibouse

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.

. Jungfrau, Switzerland. Reuters/Denis Balibouse

Up in the mountains you soon start feeling the lack of air. You have to slow your pace. Take about 30 steps you’re out of breath.

I was still recovering from a back problem so I found the physical effort hard going. It was also a lot warmer than I thought it would be: 7 degrees in the morning at almost 3,000 metres. That’s very hot.

After many hours of walking my guide and I were in front of the Konkordia mountain hut where we stayed overnight. It’s an awe-inspiring spot.

I should say below, not in front: when the shelter was built in 1877 it was 50 metres above the glacier. As the glacier has shrunk in size, the hut is now 150 metres below. A long set of steps had to be built in the 1970s to maintain access.

. Konkordia, Switzerland. Reuters/Denis Balibouse

In fact there are 460 steps. You really feel that distance.

What’s more I’m already scared of heights so I had to focus. I had to walk backwards to go down, it was too much otherwise. It’s not a place you want to fall or have an accident.

. Jungfrau, Switzerland. Reuters/Denis Balibouse

Christian Pletscher, a 60-year-old mountain guide, has seen many changes in the region over the years. Pletscher and his 19-year-old daughter recently stopped off at a refreshment hut near the Col de la Forclaz, a mountain pass close to the French border.

"When I was her age, the Trient Glacier was about 500 metres from the hut," he said. "Now the glacier is a long, long way away."

"When I look at the glaciers I think of my children," Pletscher said. "That scares me."

Panorama

Panorama Image

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.

. Fiesch, Switzerland. Reuters/Denis Balibouse

And on the ice, Aletsch guide Richard Bortis said, "If I stay on the glacier for several days ... I can even see the changes myself."

The glacier is a vast water reserve, important for irrigation and hydroelectric power.

In mid-summer, the main sounds are of the occasional rockfall and of small planes buzzing overhead, taking tourists over the ice. The only sign of life is a few insects living in small melt water pools on the ice.

. Fiesch, Switzerland. Reuters/Denis Balibouse

For glaciers from the Andes to Alaska, rising temperatures mean that a greater volume of ice is lost from the summer melt than the amount replenished by ice formation in wintertime. The Aletsch flows downhill at about 180 metres a year.

The World Glacier Monitoring Service says "the rates of early 21st-century mass loss are without precedent on a global scale" at least since measurements began around 1850.

The United Nations' panel of climate scientists says sea levels are set to rise by between 26 and 82 cm by the late 21st century, after a gain of about 20 cm since 1900, partly fed by water from melting glaciers.

Thinking back to my time on the Aletsch Glacier, what I remember most vividly now is the sheer majesty of the place. I loved being in this wilderness, one of the last wild places we have in Switzerland.

If I found the glacier an amazing place beforehand, my respect and admiration for it only increased by walking those 20-plus kilometres - one spiked step at a time.

. Fiesch, Switzerland. Reuters/Denis Balibouse

Go to next story in the series - Earthprints: Rio Pardo