On the other side of the border in Austria, Andrea Fischer, vice-director of the Interdisciplinary Mountain Research Institute of the Austrian Academy, said that these types of mass alpine movements are becoming stronger and more frequent.
“A third of Austria’s glaciers will disappear over the next five years,” said Fischer, standing on what remains of the Stubai glacier, about 72 miles northeast of Moreratsch. At the top of one of the most popular ski resorts in Austria, Stubai should disappear entirely by 2033.
“The end of the Alpine glaciers is really very close, very close. And we see it. It is not modeling on the computer. It’s really a fact,” added Fischer, sailing on a muddy track to the edge of the ice.
Global temperatures continue to climb while international efforts to slow down greenhouse gas emissions. Last year was the warmest ever recorded, according to NASA. The American withdrawal of the Paris climate agreement has considerably undermined the efforts of the world climate, which makes the objective already difficult to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (about 3 degrees fahrenheit) almost impossible.
Europe is the fastest continent on earth and the temperature of Austria has increased by 3.1 degrees Celsius since 1900, more than double the world average. The study of glaciers, said Fischer, is essential to understand where the climate is heading.
“Glaciers are climatic archives,” she said. The glaciers preserve the recordings of precipitation and atmospheric circulation of centuries, data which does not exist anywhere else. “I really chase each piece of cold ice containing this archive information,” she said, before everything left.
