14 DAY TRIAL // Even if global warming is most felt at the Poles, the phenomenon is global, reaching from tropical to cold areas. At lowers latitudes, glaciers are a sensitive indicator of the warming.
And indeed, by 2050, the Alps glaciers could be just a memory.
Glaciers absence will affect the drinking and irrigation water supply, would increase rock falling and damage fatally the European ski industry. "On average about 3 % of Alpine glacial ice is lost each year," said Roland Psenner, a fresh water scientist at the University of Innsbruck in Austria.
That means that roughly 3.3 feet (1 meter) of ice layer is lost annually. "10 % was lost in the record-breaking heat of 2003. 7 % was lost in 2006," Psenner said. "If the melting goes on at this pace, glaciers will be gone by 2030 to 2050-except some high-altitude sites in the French, Swiss, and Italian Alps," he noted.
The glacier loss in the Alps is consistent with the worldwide trend, noticed also in Kilimanjaro, in the Andes and the Himalaya.
"At all these sites it's the same story. Not only are the glaciers retreating, they are accelerating in the rate at which they are retreating," Thompson said. "That's very consistent with what's going on with the glaciers in the Alps", said Lonnie Thompson, who is a glaciologist at the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University.
In the last quarter of the century, the Alps glaciers have lost about 31 feet (9.6 meters). This phenomenon affects the European ski resorts, a multimillion-dollar winter affair.
The world was amazed when, in 2005, the Andermatt resort in Switzerland wrapped part of its glacier in a high-tech blanket in an effort to stop its loss. "Global warming fueled by greenhouse gas emissions appears to be the main cause of the melting glaciers," said Psenner.
Paleoclimatology showed that in the last 10,000 years (when the Ice Age finished), the Alp glaciers were at least once on the verge of disappearance.
But while these shifts took place during periods of hundreds of years, the current one has taken less then 100 years. "Even if we could manage to keep the CO2 level constant at 385 parts per million (280 parts per million was the value before human activity)-mission: impossible-the glaciers will disappear within one generation," he said. "They will be gone even if we keep the climate of today."