The Furka Pass, Switzerland: On the hairpin bend of a Swiss mountain pass, a Victorian-era hotel built for tourists to admire the Rhone Glacier has been abandoned now that the ice has retreated nearly 2 km (1.2 miles) uphill.
A handout picture of the Trient Glacier taken in 1891 and released by ETH Library Zurich, is seen displayed at the same location August 26, 2019. A Reuters montage of images – showing photos of modern-day mountain landscapes next to archive shots of the same scenes decades earlier – reveals the dramatic change.
More than 500 Swiss glaciers have already vanished, and the government says 90% of the remaining 1,500 will go by the end of the century if nothing is done to cut emissions. Their retreat is expected to have a major impact on water levels – possibly raising them initially as the ice melts but depleting them long term. Officials fear the changes could trigger rockfalls and other hazards and affect the economy.
Visitors can still walk into a cave carved into the glacier. But the ice above is now draped with huge white sheets to reflect the sun’s heat. Despite such efforts, melt waters have formed a green lake. Landlocked Switzerland is warming at twice the global rate and over the last year its glaciers have lost 2% of volume, said Mathias Huss, who heads Switzerland’s glacier monitoring institute GLAMOS which has data stretching back 150 years.
