Fast melting ice climate change glaciers
By: Paolo Degiovanni
Tags: Glaciers, Climate Change, Juxtapose, Global Warming, Melting Ice Caps

How fast are glaciers melting? Let’s find it with an amazing visual technique!

This article wants to explore a common topic: melting of glaciers.

But, trust me, don’t expect the usual story with many complex words about this phenomenon and its causes. Of course, there’ll be something written concepts about glaciers, but mainly the images will speak alone. Thanks to a very particular technique, your eyes will be able to see without any doubt that a massive change is taking place. And, unfortunately, quite quickly too.

Well, first of all, we need a couple of basic scientific concepts to better understand the situation.

Every glacier lives. Not as we understand life for other living beings, of course, but a glacier arises, it grows, it increases in size, it also moves. And it does throughout his entire life.

Great Western Vedretta Glacier in 1979 (courtesy of Franco Secchieri)

A glacier grows simply for two reasons: the freezing cold and the snow that settles on the existing ice. After 3–5 years (in case of alpine glaciers) the snow will turn into ice and the glacier will increase in size.

This phase is called “accumulation”.

But it’s not always winter, so summer and the heat will lead to the opposite phenomenon: ice becomes water, it melts and so ice is lost.

The scientific name for this phase is “melting or fusion”.

To be accurate, it is not only heat that causes the ice to melt because the friction between the ice and the rock and the geothermal heat also play their role. And this doesn’t happen only in summer, but also in spring and autumn and it depends on the glacier’s sun exposure, altitude and other factors.

Finally, this tiny equilibrium between loss and accumulation has a name: glacier mass balance.

Scientists can study the health of a glacier by observing this continuous succession of moments of loss and accumulation.

And, please, never forget that melting and accumulation phases of a glacier are both natural phenomena.

But what if something could break this balance? What if, for example, temperatures should be higher than normal during all seasons?

Here is what can happen, thanks to the following powerful web tool called Juxtapose. Basically, you can compare two photos, pictures, media by highlighting slow changes over time.

Please, try scrolling the middle line to obtain a stunning effect!

Both images refer to the Western Gran Vedretta Glacier. It lays on The Great Pillar Mountain (Hochfernerspitze in German) at 3510 meters in the eastern Alps, along the border line between Italy (province of Bolzano) and Austria (Tyrol). As you may have noticed, we are talking about a range of only 33 years between the first photo and the second. And, there’s no word to describe better such a sudden retreating ice as global warming.

Glaciers are voiceless witnesses of climate change.

The real question we must ask ourselves today, therefore, is not whether or not the melting of glaciers is happening, but how fast it’s going. And, possibly, find solutions and answers faster than the change itself.