"Oh where, oh where did the Glacier go"?

[SoCalDem]

http://www.iht.com/bin/print_ipub.php?file=/articles/2005/08/07/news/glacier.php


In Austrian Alps, a not-so-glacial retreat
By Richard Bernstein The New York Times
MONDAY, AUGUST 8, 2005


KAISER-FRANZ-JOSEFS-HÖHE, Austria

The jagged peak of the 3,467-meter mountain known as the Johannisberg looms up against the sky at the end of a stunningly beautiful valley here in the Austrian Alps, and the Pasterze, Austria's biggest glacier, extends slowly downward and away from it for eight kilometers.

The glacier is broad and grand, like the river of ice it is, and yet something about it is visibly not right, and you can tell right away what it is from the steep cable car that was built a bit over 40 years ago to take tourists from the heights above down to the glacier itself."When it was built, it went right down to the glacier," said Erhard Trojer, owner of the Hotel Lärchenhof in the nearby ski resort village of Heiligenblut.But now, if you stand at the bottom of the cable car run and look down at the tourists disporting themselves on the glacier, it is as though you are looking at them from an airplane."It's going down from four to eight meters a year," said Trojer, who grew up in this valley. "In the early 1960s, they used to have a ski race every spring from the top of the Grossglockner to the bottom of the glacier."

The Grossglockner, which looms above the Pasterze, is, at 3,798 meters, or 12,460 feet, Austria's highest mountain."They can't do it anymore," Trojer said a bit sadly. "It's warmed up, and there isn't enough snow." Austria's glaciers - there are 925 of them - are shrinking fast, and as they shrink, this part of the world is slowly losing one of its many attractions, those rivers of ice that, figuratively and almost literally, reflect the grandeur of the mountains around them.

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Two European geologists, Andrea Hampel of the University of Bern and Ralf Hetzel of the University of Münster, wrote in the journal Nature this year that the retreat of glaciers could cause an increase in the number of earthquakes.Other scientists have warned that lakes of melted ice forming behind glaciers could burst through cracks in the glaciers and cause tsunami-like devastation to towns down below. "The problem is that the permafrost is going away," Hans-Erwin Minor, of the Swiss Federation Institute on Technology in Zurich, said in a telephone interview, "and there will be instabilities in the mountains, debris flows, mud flows, erosion of loose material."

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"If there is enough snow," he continued, "the sun can melt some of it without reduction of the glacier, but we used to get five to seven meters of snow each winter and now we only get about three, and now the snow melts away by beginning to middle of May."