At Europe's melting glaciers, signs of climate peril are everywhere

MORTERATSCH, Switzerland — Almost 7,000 feet above sea level, the trail leading up to Morteratsch Glacier gets a little longer every year.

Leo Hösli has made the climb many times. Each step sends shards of stone clattering downhill, debris once sealed beneath glacial ice.

Several months ago, Hösli, who is doing doctoral research on Morteratsch, drilled seven stakes into the ice caves at the base of the glacier. By early August, he couldn’t get close enough to take measurements. The summer melt was so fierce that the caves had become too unstable to enter. Setting up a zoom lens, he found only one stake still in place.

“They’ve melted out or collapsed under these parts of the ice cave that have fallen down,” Hösli said. “It’s just too warm for the glacier to exist at this state right now.”

Europe’s glaciers are shrinking faster, in every dimension, than anywhere else on Earth.

A landmark study published in the journal Nature, the largest of its kind, using field measurements and satellite data from 35 research teams, found glaciers in the Alps and Pyrenees have lost about 40% of their mass since 2000. 2022 and 2023 set records for percentage loss, coinciding with peak global temperatures.

Morteratsch is one of the most studied glaciers in the world, thanks to its accessibility and its dramatic retreat, more than 2 miles in the last 165 years, driven by human-induced climate change. During our hike up the glacier, Hösli pointed to artifacts that showed just how far the glacier has retreated.

“I think walking up here and seeing the signposts, seeing where the glacier used to be a hundred years ago, 50 years ago has more of an effect than just seeing it in a picture,” he said.

But the soundtrack is just as striking as the view: rocks clattering down the valley walls, the constant roar of meltwater.

Glaciers are the planet’s most visible climate indicators, but because they’re remote, their loss can feel abstract. In Europe, glaciers support several important industries, like agriculture and tourism. Communities depend on meltwater for drinking and farming, as well as on the ice and snow for winter tourism. Downstream, it feeds rivers that eventually result in rising sea levels worldwide.

The retreat of glaciers has also left behind unstable landscapes that are rapidly shifting, causing destructive landslides that threaten Alpine villages.

Across the border in Austria, Andrea Fischer, the vice-director of the Austrian Academy of Sciences’ Institute for Interdisciplinary Mountain Research, said these kinds of mass alpine movements are becoming stronger and more frequent.

“One-third of Austria’s glaciers will vanish in the next five years,” Fischer said, standing on what remains of the Stubai Glacier, about 72 miles northeast of Morteratsch. At the top of one of Austria’s most popular ski resorts, Stubai is projected to disappear entirely by 2033.

“The end of the Alpine glaciers is really coming very, very close. And we see it. It’s not modeling in the computer. It’s a real fact,” Fischer added as she navigated down a muddy track to the edge of the ice.

Global temperatures keep climbing as international efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions falter. Last year was the hottest on record, according to NASA. The U.S. withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement significantly undermined global climate efforts, making the already difficult goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (about 3 degrees Fahrenheit) close to impossible.

Europe is the fastest-warming continent on Earth and Austria’s temperature has risen 3.1 degrees Celsius since 1900, more than twice the global average. Studying glaciers, Fischer said, is critical to understanding where the climate is headed.

“Glaciers are climate archives,” she said. Glaciers preserve records of precipitation and atmospheric circulation stretching back centuries, data that exists nowhere else. “I’m really hunting for every piece of cold ice containing this archive information,” she said, before it’s all gone.

For decades, Fischer experimented with ways to slow glacier loss: snowmaking, pumping water into snowpack, “wrapping” ice in reflective white sheets she calls “glacier plasters,” referring to bandages. Twenty years ago, she hoped these sheets could work on a large scale. Today, she knows they can’t.

“There is no possibility to save glaciers without saving the climate,” she added.

Living in the Alps has always been risky, Fischer said, but today the risks are amplified by global warming

At the base of the Stubai valley, last month, a massive landslide barreled through the village of Neustift, ripping through farmland and damaging a bridge. No one was injured. But Fischer ties it directly to climate change.

Melting permafrost can weaken peaks. Heavier rains trigger slides on slopes left destabilized by retreating glaciers.

Back in Switzerland, the village of Blatten was obliterated by a glacial slide in May. Villagers were evacuated, but the costly rebuilding will take years.

“The next 20 to 50 years will bring extreme changes for us living in the mountains, for all people living on the whole globe,” she said. “And we have to think about the consequences.”

And the solutions are within our control, she said.

She and Hösli agree that it’s not too late. There’s still a lot worth saving.

“There’s still huge amounts of ice here,” Hösli said, scanning the top of Morteratsch. “It’s not a completely lost cause for me. There still is hope and there’s still something we can do,” Hösli said. “It’s too early to give up.”

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com