Latest news with #MatthiasHuss
South China Morning Post
6 days ago
- Science
- South China Morning Post
Swiss glaciers face another difficult year after 13% snow deficit
The amount of snow covering Swiss glaciers at the end of the winter this year was 13 per cent below the 2010-2020 average, said a group of glacier monitoring experts last month. Each spring, when snow cover reaches its peak, Matthias Huss, head of the Glacier Monitoring Switzerland (Glamos), and his team take measurements on several Swiss glaciers. Scientists measured the snow on 1,400 Swiss glaciers. They then used these numbers to estimate the snow on all of them. Their report shows that the amount of snow this year is 13 per cent less than it was on average between the years 2010 and 2020. They say this is a 'winter snow deficit'. The measurements examine both the depth and density of the snow, providing useful data to evaluate the upcoming summer melting season. 'Overall, snow measurements on glaciers indicate another dry year with significant repercussions on melting in the coming summer,' Huss said on X. 'Another difficult year for glaciers ahead,' he added. Snow cover is vital for glaciers as it allows them to 'recharge' their mass while protecting them from heat and sunlight in spring and summer. Swiss glaciers, severely impacted by climate change, melted as much in 2022 and 2023 as between 1960 and 1990, losing in total about 10 per cent of their volume. Despite a very snowy 2024 winter, glaciers in Switzerland still lost 2.4 per cent of their overall volume last year due to summer heat. Also, dust from the Sahara Desert made the ice melt even faster. The accumulation of dust on the ice reduces the albedo effect (see graphic).
CNN
07-06-2025
- Science
- CNN
Mountains are among the planet's most beautiful places. They're also becoming the deadliest
Climate change StormsFacebookTweetLink Follow Jan Beutel was half-watching a live stream of Kleines Nesthorn, a mountain peak in the Swiss Alps, when he realized its cacophony of creaks and rumbles was getting louder. He dropped his work, turned up the sound and found himself unable to look away. 'The whole screen exploded,' he said. Beutel, a computer engineer specializing in mountain monitoring, had just witnessed a glacier collapse. On May 28, an avalanche of millions of tons of ice and rock barreled down the slope, burying Blatten, a centuries-old village nestled in the valley below. Local authorities had already evacuated the village after parts of the mountain had crumbled onto the glacier; a 64-year old man believed to have stayed remains missing. But no one expected an event of this magnitude. Successive rock avalanches onto the glacier increased the pressure on the ice, causing it to melt faster and the glacier to accelerate, eventually destabilizing it and pushing it from its bed. The collapse was sudden, violent and catastrophic. 'This one just left no moment to catch a breath,' Beutel said. The underlying causes will take time to unravel. A collapse of this magnitude would have been set in motion by geological factors going back decades at least, said Matthias Huss, a glaciologist at the Swiss university ETH Zürich. But it's 'likely climate change is involved,' he said, as warming temperatures melt the ice that holds mountains together. It's a problem affecting mountains across the planet. People have long been fascinated with mountains for their dramatic beauty. Some make their homes beneath them — around 1 billion live in mountain communities — others are drawn by adventure, the challenge of conquering peaks. These majestic landscapes have always been dangerous, but as the world warms, they are becoming much more unpredictable and much deadlier. 'We do not fully understand the hazard at the moment, nor how the dangers are changing with climate change,' said David Petley, an Earth scientist at the University of Hull in England. Snowy and icy mountains are inherently sensitive to climate change. Very high mountains are etched with fractures filled with ice — called permafrost — which glues them together. As the permafrost thaws, mountains can become destabilized. 'We are seeing more large rock slope collapses in many mountains as a result,' Petley told CNN. Glaciers are also melting at a terrifyingly rapid rate, especially in regions such as the Alps and the Andes, which face the possibility of a glacier-free future. As these rivers of ancient ice disappear, they expose mountain faces, causing more rocks to fall. There have been several big collapses in the Alps in recent years as ice melts and permafrost thaws. In July 2022, about 64,000 tons of water, rock and ice broke off from the Marmolada Glacier in northern Italy after unusually hot weather caused massive melting. The subsequent ice avalanche killed 11 people hiking a popular trail. In 2023, the peak of Fluchthorn, a mountain on the border between Switzerland and Austria, collapsed as permafrost thawed, sending more than 100,000 cubic meters of rock into the valley below. 'This really seems to be something new. There seems to be a trend in such big events in high mountain areas,' Huss said. Melting glaciers can also form lakes, which can become so full that they burst their banks, sending water and debris cascading down mountainsides. In 2023, a permafrost landslide caused a large glacial lake in Sikkim, India, to break its banks, causing a catastrophic deluge that killed at least 55 people. Last year, a glacial lake outburst caused destructive flooding in Juneau, Alaska — a now regular occurrence for the city. After two years in a row of destructive glacial flooding, Juneau is scrambling to erect temporary flood barriers ahead of the next melting season, the Anchorage Daily News reported this week. As well as melting ice, there's another hazard destabilizing mountains: rain. Extreme precipitation is increasingly falling on mountains as rain instead of snow, said Mohammed Ombadi, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan College of Engineering. His research shows every 1 degree Celsius of global warming increases extreme rainfall events by 15%. This pushes up the risks of flooding, landslides and soil erosion. Northern Hemisphere mountains will become 'hotspots' for extreme rain, Ombadi said. Heavy rainfall this month in Sikkim, a Himalayan state in northern India, triggered a series of landslides, killing at least three people. Images show deep muddy scars carved into the mountain, with buildings and trees obliterated. Scientists do have tools to monitor mountains and warn communities. 'There are fantastic instruments that can predict quite accurately when a rock mass (or) ice mass is going to come down,' Huss said. The difficulty is knowing where to look when a landscape is constantly changing in unpredictable ways. 'This is what climate change actually does… there are more new and previously unrecognized situations,' Huss said. These are particularly hard to deal with in developing countries, which don't have the resources for extensive monitoring. Scientists say the only way to reduce the impact of the climate crisis on mountains is to bring down global temperatures, but some changes are already locked in. 'Even if we manage to stabilize the climate right now, (glaciers) will continue to retreat significantly,' Huss said. Almost 40% of the world's glaciers are already doomed, according to a new study. 'We could have maybe avoided most of (the negative impacts) if we had acted 50 years ago and brought down CO2 emissions. But we failed,' Huss added. The consequences are hitting as the numbers of people living in and visiting mountains increases. 'We're just more exposed than we used to be,' he said. Ludovic Ravanel, an Alpine climber and geomorphologist who focuses on mountains' response to global warming, has a front line view of the increasing dangers of these landscapes. Mountains are the 'most convincing' hotspots of climate change, he told CNN. When he's focused on the science, he keeps his emotions at arm's length. But as a father, and a mountaineer, it hits him. 'I see just how critical the situation is. And even then, we're only at the very beginning.'
CNN
07-06-2025
- Science
- CNN
Mountains are among the planet's most beautiful places. They're also becoming the deadliest
Jan Beutel was half-watching a live stream of Kleines Nesthorn, a mountain peak in the Swiss Alps, when he realized its cacophony of creaks and rumbles was getting louder. He dropped his work, turned up the sound and found himself unable to look away. 'The whole screen exploded,' he said. Beutel, a computer engineer specializing in mountain monitoring, had just witnessed a glacier collapse. On May 28, an avalanche of millions of tons of ice and rock barreled down the slope, burying Blatten, a centuries-old village nestled in the valley below. Local authorities had already evacuated the village after parts of the mountain had crumbled onto the glacier; a 64-year old man believed to have stayed remains missing. But no one expected an event of this magnitude. Successive rock avalanches onto the glacier increased the pressure on the ice, causing it to melt faster and the glacier to accelerate, eventually destabilizing it and pushing it from its bed. The collapse was sudden, violent and catastrophic. 'This one just left no moment to catch a breath,' Beutel said. The underlying causes will take time to unravel. A collapse of this magnitude would have been set in motion by geological factors going back decades at least, said Matthias Huss, a glaciologist at the Swiss university ETH Zürich. But it's 'likely climate change is involved,' he said, as warming temperatures melt the ice that holds mountains together. It's a problem affecting mountains across the planet. People have long been fascinated with mountains for their dramatic beauty. Some make their homes beneath them — around 1 billion live in mountain communities — others are drawn by adventure, the challenge of conquering peaks. These majestic landscapes have always been dangerous, but as the world warms, they are becoming much more unpredictable and much deadlier. 'We do not fully understand the hazard at the moment, nor how the dangers are changing with climate change,' said David Petley, an Earth scientist at the University of Hull in England. Snowy and icy mountains are inherently sensitive to climate change. Very high mountains are etched with fractures filled with ice — called permafrost — which glues them together. As the permafrost thaws, mountains can become destabilized. 'We are seeing more large rock slope collapses in many mountains as a result,' Petley told CNN. Glaciers are also melting at a terrifyingly rapid rate, especially in regions such as the Alps and the Andes, which face the possibility of a glacier-free future. As these rivers of ancient ice disappear, they expose mountain faces, causing more rocks to fall. There have been several big collapses in the Alps in recent years as ice melts and permafrost thaws. In July 2022, about 64,000 tons of water, rock and ice broke off from the Marmolada Glacier in northern Italy after unusually hot weather caused massive melting. The subsequent ice avalanche killed 11 people hiking a popular trail. In 2023, the peak of Fluchthorn, a mountain on the border between Switzerland and Austria, collapsed as permafrost thawed, sending more than 100,000 cubic meters of rock into the valley below. 'This really seems to be something new. There seems to be a trend in such big events in high mountain areas,' Huss said. Melting glaciers can also form lakes, which can become so full that they burst their banks, sending water and debris cascading down mountainsides. In 2023, a permafrost landslide caused a large glacial lake in Sikkim, India, to break its banks, causing a catastrophic deluge that killed at least 55 people. Last year, a glacial lake outburst caused destructive flooding in Juneau, Alaska — a now regular occurrence for the city. After two years in a row of destructive glacial flooding, Juneau is scrambling to erect temporary flood barriers ahead of the next melting season, the Anchorage Daily News reported this week. As well as melting ice, there's another hazard destabilizing mountains: rain. Extreme precipitation is increasingly falling on mountains as rain instead of snow, said Mohammed Ombadi, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan College of Engineering. His research shows every 1 degree Celsius of global warming increases extreme rainfall events by 15%. This pushes up the risks of flooding, landslides and soil erosion. Northern Hemisphere mountains will become 'hotspots' for extreme rain, Ombadi said. Heavy rainfall this month in Sikkim, a Himalayan state in northern India, triggered a series of landslides, killing at least three people. Images show deep muddy scars carved into the mountain, with buildings and trees obliterated. Scientists do have tools to monitor mountains and warn communities. 'There are fantastic instruments that can predict quite accurately when a rock mass (or) ice mass is going to come down,' Huss said. The difficulty is knowing where to look when a landscape is constantly changing in unpredictable ways. 'This is what climate change actually does… there are more new and previously unrecognized situations,' Huss said. These are particularly hard to deal with in developing countries, which don't have the resources for extensive monitoring. Scientists say the only way to reduce the impact of the climate crisis on mountains is to bring down global temperatures, but some changes are already locked in. 'Even if we manage to stabilize the climate right now, (glaciers) will continue to retreat significantly,' Huss said. Almost 40% of the world's glaciers are already doomed, according to a new study. 'We could have maybe avoided most of (the negative impacts) if we had acted 50 years ago and brought down CO2 emissions. But we failed,' Huss added. The consequences are hitting as the numbers of people living in and visiting mountains increases. 'We're just more exposed than we used to be,' he said. Ludovic Ravanel, an Alpine climber and geomorphologist who focuses on mountains' response to global warming, has a front line view of the increasing dangers of these landscapes. Mountains are the 'most convincing' hotspots of climate change, he told CNN. When he's focused on the science, he keeps his emotions at arm's length. But as a father, and a mountaineer, it hits him. 'I see just how critical the situation is. And even then, we're only at the very beginning.'
CNN
07-06-2025
- Science
- CNN
Mountains are among the planet's most beautiful places. They're also becoming the deadliest
Climate change StormsFacebookTweetLink Follow Jan Beutel was half-watching a live stream of Kleines Nesthorn, a mountain peak in the Swiss Alps, when he realized its cacophony of creaks and rumbles was getting louder. He dropped his work, turned up the sound and found himself unable to look away. 'The whole screen exploded,' he said. Beutel, a computer engineer specializing in mountain monitoring, had just witnessed a glacier collapse. On May 28, an avalanche of millions of tons of ice and rock barreled down the slope, burying Blatten, a centuries-old village nestled in the valley below. Local authorities had already evacuated the village after parts of the mountain had crumbled onto the glacier; a 64-year old man believed to have stayed remains missing. But no one expected an event of this magnitude. Successive rock avalanches onto the glacier increased the pressure on the ice, causing it to melt faster and the glacier to accelerate, eventually destabilizing it and pushing it from its bed. The collapse was sudden, violent and catastrophic. 'This one just left no moment to catch a breath,' Beutel said. The underlying causes will take time to unravel. A collapse of this magnitude would have been set in motion by geological factors going back decades at least, said Matthias Huss, a glaciologist at the Swiss university ETH Zürich. But it's 'likely climate change is involved,' he said, as warming temperatures melt the ice that holds mountains together. It's a problem affecting mountains across the planet. People have long been fascinated with mountains for their dramatic beauty. Some make their homes beneath them — around 1 billion live in mountain communities — others are drawn by adventure, the challenge of conquering peaks. These majestic landscapes have always been dangerous, but as the world warms, they are becoming much more unpredictable and much deadlier. 'We do not fully understand the hazard at the moment, nor how the dangers are changing with climate change,' said David Petley, an Earth scientist at the University of Hull in England. Snowy and icy mountains are inherently sensitive to climate change. Very high mountains are etched with fractures filled with ice — called permafrost — which glues them together. As the permafrost thaws, mountains can become destabilized. 'We are seeing more large rock slope collapses in many mountains as a result,' Petley told CNN. Glaciers are also melting at a terrifyingly rapid rate, especially in regions such as the Alps and the Andes, which face the possibility of a glacier-free future. As these rivers of ancient ice disappear, they expose mountain faces, causing more rocks to fall. There have been several big collapses in the Alps in recent years as ice melts and permafrost thaws. In July 2022, about 64,000 tons of water, rock and ice broke off from the Marmolada Glacier in northern Italy after unusually hot weather caused massive melting. The subsequent ice avalanche killed 11 people hiking a popular trail. In 2023, the peak of Fluchthorn, a mountain on the border between Switzerland and Austria, collapsed as permafrost thawed, sending more than 100,000 cubic meters of rock into the valley below. 'This really seems to be something new. There seems to be a trend in such big events in high mountain areas,' Huss said. Melting glaciers can also form lakes, which can become so full that they burst their banks, sending water and debris cascading down mountainsides. In 2023, a permafrost landslide caused a large glacial lake in Sikkim, India, to break its banks, causing a catastrophic deluge that killed at least 55 people. Last year, a glacial lake outburst caused destructive flooding in Juneau, Alaska — a now regular occurrence for the city. After two years in a row of destructive glacial flooding, Juneau is scrambling to erect temporary flood barriers ahead of the next melting season, the Anchorage Daily News reported this week. As well as melting ice, there's another hazard destabilizing mountains: rain. Extreme precipitation is increasingly falling on mountains as rain instead of snow, said Mohammed Ombadi, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan College of Engineering. His research shows every 1 degree Celsius of global warming increases extreme rainfall events by 15%. This pushes up the risks of flooding, landslides and soil erosion. Northern Hemisphere mountains will become 'hotspots' for extreme rain, Ombadi said. Heavy rainfall this month in Sikkim, a Himalayan state in northern India, triggered a series of landslides, killing at least three people. Images show deep muddy scars carved into the mountain, with buildings and trees obliterated. Scientists do have tools to monitor mountains and warn communities. 'There are fantastic instruments that can predict quite accurately when a rock mass (or) ice mass is going to come down,' Huss said. The difficulty is knowing where to look when a landscape is constantly changing in unpredictable ways. 'This is what climate change actually does… there are more new and previously unrecognized situations,' Huss said. These are particularly hard to deal with in developing countries, which don't have the resources for extensive monitoring. Scientists say the only way to reduce the impact of the climate crisis on mountains is to bring down global temperatures, but some changes are already locked in. 'Even if we manage to stabilize the climate right now, (glaciers) will continue to retreat significantly,' Huss said. Almost 40% of the world's glaciers are already doomed, according to a new study. 'We could have maybe avoided most of (the negative impacts) if we had acted 50 years ago and brought down CO2 emissions. But we failed,' Huss added. The consequences are hitting as the numbers of people living in and visiting mountains increases. 'We're just more exposed than we used to be,' he said. Ludovic Ravanel, an Alpine climber and geomorphologist who focuses on mountains' response to global warming, has a front line view of the increasing dangers of these landscapes. Mountains are the 'most convincing' hotspots of climate change, he told CNN. When he's focused on the science, he keeps his emotions at arm's length. But as a father, and a mountaineer, it hits him. 'I see just how critical the situation is. And even then, we're only at the very beginning.'
Japan Times
02-06-2025
- Climate
- Japan Times
How Switzerland's Birch glacier collapsed
A cascade of events in the Swiss Alps led to the dramatic collapse of the Birch glacier, wiping out Blatten village in the valley below, glaciologists and geoscientists said on Friday. Experts knew days ahead of Wednesday's landslide that the glacier was likely to suffer a catastrophic failure. But the reasons why date back much further. There are strong theories on the causes, and to what degree the disaster is linked to climate change — but these are yet to be confirmed by scientific analysis. "This can be considered as a cascading event, because we have different processes involved," explained Christophe Lambiel, senior lecturer at the University of Lausanne's Institute of Earth Surface Dynamics. Mountain above the glacier The 3,342-meter Kleines Nesthorn mountain above the glacier was already somewhat unstable, and rockfalls accelerated dramatically around 10 days beforehand. Experts feared a total collapse within hours, but instead there were successive rockfalls over several days, which was actually the best-case scenario. Rockfall onto glacier Some 3 million cubic meters of rock were deposited on the glacier. "If you put a lot of weight on an unstable foundation, it can just slip away. And this is what actually happened," Matthias Huss, the director of Glacier Monitoring Switzerland (GLAMOS), said. "The glacier accelerated strongly in response to this additional loading, and then the disaster struck." The Birch glacier The Birch glacier was a special case: the only Swiss glacier that was advancing rather than shrinking. However, this was not because of extra snowfall. Its advance "was quite likely due to the pre-loading with rockfalls from this mountain, which has finally collapsed. So the landslide didn't start from nothing," said Huss. A helicopter removes pieces of wood obstructing the river Lonza after the Birch glacier collapsed and a massive landslide destroyed the village of Blatten, on Saturday. | AFP-JIJI The glacier was on a steep slope, and even steeper at the front, worsening the dynamics. Smaller-scale falls from the front of the glacier Tuesday were expected to continue, with Wednesday's sudden total collapse considered a less-probable scenario. How the glacier collapsed The rockfalls altered the stress equation between the weight of the glacier and the slope, which governs its forward speed, Lambiel said. Like pushing a car, it takes a lot of force to initiate movement, but less once it is on the move, he explained. Huss said the 1,000 meters of elevation between the glacier and the Lotschental valley floor added a "huge amount of potential energy," which through friction melts part of the ice, making the fall "much more dynamic than if it was just rock." Role of melting permafrost Permafrost conditions are degrading throughout the Alps. Ice inside the cracks in the rocks has been thawing to ever-deeper levels over the last decade, especially after the summer 2022 heat wave. "Ice is considered as the cement of the mountains. Decreasing the quality of the cement decreases the stability of the mountain," said Lambiel. Huss added, "At the moment, we can't say it's because of permafrost thaw that this mountain collapsed — but it is at least a very probable explanation, or one factor, that has triggered or accelerated this process of the mountain falling apart." Role of climate change Jakob Steiner, a geoscientist at the Lotschental valley floor, said, "There is no clear evidence as of yet, for this specific case, that this was caused by climate change." Huss said making such a direct link was "complicated." "If it was just because of climate change that this mountain collapsed, all mountains in the Alps could collapse — and they don't," he said. "It's a combination of the long-term changes in the geology of the mountain. "The failing of the glacier as such — this is not related to climate change. It's more the permafrost processes, which are very complex, long-term changes." Lambiel said of a link between climate change and the glacier moving forward over time, "Honestly, we don't know. "But the increasing rockfalls on the glacier during the last 10 years — this can be linked with climate change." Other glaciers Modern monitoring techniques detect acceleration in the ice with high precision — and therefore allow for early warning. Lambiel said around 80 glaciers in the same region of Switzerland were considered dangerous, and under monitoring. "The big challenge is to recognise where to direct the detailed monitoring," said Huss. Lambiel said sites with glacier-permafrost interactions above 3,000 meters would now need more research. But they are difficult to reach and monitor. Steiner said, "Probably the rapidly changing permafrost can play some kind of role. "This is concerning because this means that mountains are becoming a lot more unstable."
