Swiss glacier collapse highlights rising risk from global warming

Euronews

30-05-2025

The landslide that buried most of a Swiss village this week is focusing renewed attention on the role of global warming in glacier collapses around the world and the increasing dangers.
How glaciers collapse - from the Alps and Andes to the Himalayas and Antarctica - can differ, scientists say. But in almost every instance, climate change is playing a role.
In Switzerland, the mountainside gave way Wednesday near the village of Blatten, in the southern Lötschental valley, because the rock face above the Birch Glacier had become unstable when mountain permafrost melted, causing debris to fall and cover the glacier in recent years, said Martin Truffer, a physics professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks who studies how glaciers move.
While the debris insulated the glacier and slowed melting, its weight caused the ice to begin moving - which accelerated dramatically a few weeks ago.
Authorities ordered the evacuation of about 300 people, as well as all livestock, from the village in recent days, 'when it became clear that there's a whole mountainside that's about to collapse,' said Truffer, who is from Switzerland.
Lakes that form at the base of glaciers as they melt and retreat also sometimes burst, often with catastrophic results.
Water can even lift an entire glacier, allowing it to drain, said Truffer, adding that Alaska's capital of Juneau has flooded in recent years because a lake forms every year on a rapidly retreating glacier and eventually bursts.
In 2022, an apartment building-sized chunk of the Marmolada glacier in Italy's Dolomite mountains detached during a summer heat wave, sending an avalanche of debris down the popular summer hiking destination, killing 11.
A glacier in Tibet's Aru mountain range suddenly collapsed in 2016, killing nine people and their livestock, followed a few months later by the collapse of another glacier.
There also have been collapses in Peru, including one in 2006 that caused a mini tsunami; most recently, a glacial lagoon overflowed in April, triggering a landslide that killed two.
'It's amazing sometimes how rapidly they can collapse,' said Lonnie Thompson, a glacier expert at the Ohio State University. 'The instability of these glaciers is a real and growing problem, and there are thousands and thousands of people that are at risk.'
Scientists say melting glaciers will raise sea levels for decades, but the loss of inland glaciers also acutely affects those living nearby who rely on them for water for drinking water and agriculture.
Scientists say greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels such as coal have already locked in enough global warming to doom many of the world's glaciers - which already have retreated significantly.
For example, glaciers in the Alps have lost 50 per cent of their area since 1950, and the rate at which ice is being lost has been accelerating, with 'projections ... that all the glaciers in the Alps could be gone in this century,' Thompson said.
Switzerland, which has the most glaciers of any country in Europe, saw 4 per cent of its total glacier volume disappear in 2023, the second-biggest decline in a single year after a 6 per cent drop in 2022.
A 2023 study found that Peru has lost more than half of its glacier surface in the last six decades, and 175 glaciers disappeared due to climate change between 2016 and 2020, mostly due to the increase in the average global temperature.
A study published Thursday in Science said that even if global temperatures stabilized at their current level, 40 per cent of the world's glaciers still would be lost.
But if warming were limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius - the long-term warming limit since the late 1800s called for by the 2015 Paris climate agreement - twice as much glacier ice could be preserved than would be otherwise.
Even so, many areas will become ice-free no matter what, Truffer, the University of Alaska expert.
'There's places in Alaska where we've shown that it doesn't take any more global warming,' for them to disappear, Truffer said. 'The reason some ... (still) exist is simply because it takes a certain amount of time for them to melt. But the climate is already such that they're screwed.'
After British journalist Dom Phillips was killed while researching an ambitious book on how to protect the world's largest rainforest, friends vowed to finish the project. Three years later, their task is complete.
'How to Save the Amazon' published yesterday (28 May) in Brazil and the UK ahead of its US release on 10 June. It was pieced together by fellow journalists who immersed themselves in Phillips' notes, outlines and the handful of chapters he'd already written.
The resulting book pairs Phillips' own writing with others' contributions in a powerful examination of the cause for which he gave his life.
In addition to the core group who led the work on finishing the book, other colleagues and friends helped to edit chapters, including AP journalists Fabiano Maisonnave and David Biller.
Phillips, who had been a regular contributor to The Guardian newspaper, was taking one of the final reporting trips planned for his book when he was gunned down by fishermen on 5 June 2022, in western Amazon's Javari Valley.
Also killed was Bruno Pereira, a Brazilian expert on Indigenous tribes who had made enemies in the region for defending the local communities from intruding fishermen, poachers and illegal gold miners.
Their deaths made headlines around the world. Nine people have been indicted in the killings.
'It was just a horrifying, really sad moment. Everybody was trying to think: How can you deal with something like this? And the book was there,' said Jonathan Watts, an Amazon-based environmental writer for The Guardian who co-authored the foreword and one of the chapters.
With the blessing of Phillips' widow, Alessandra Sampaio, a group of five friends agreed to carry the project forward. The group led by Watts also included Andrew Fishman, the Rio-based president of The Intercept Brasil; Phillips' agent, Rebecca Carter; David Davies, a colleague from his days in London as a music journalist; and Tom Hennigan, Latin America correspondent for The Irish Times.
'It was a way to not just feel awful about what had happened, but to get on with something. Especially because so many of Dom's friends are journalists,' Watts said. 'And what you fall back on is what you know best, which is journalism.'
By the time of his death, Phillips had travelled extensively across the Amazon and had completed an introduction and nearly four of the 10 planned chapters. He also left behind an outline of the remaining chapters, with different degrees of detail, and many pages of handwritten notes, some of them barely legible.
'I think it's fair to say even Dom didn't yet know what he would do exactly in those chapters,' Watts said.
Phillips was searching for hope. He promised his editors a character-driven travel book in which readers would get to know a wide-ranging cast of people living in the area, 'all of whom know and understand the Amazon intimately and have innovative solutions for the millions of people who live there.'
The group led by Watts selected writers for the remaining chapters, with subjects ranging from a bioeconomy initiative in Brazil's Acre state to global funding for rainforest preservation.
Indigenous leader Beto Marubo of the Javari Valley was recruited to co-write an afterword. The team also launched a successful crowdfunding campaign to pay for more reporting trips.
Among the group's challenges was ensuring that the book reflected a political shift in Brazil's approach to the Amazon in the years since Phillips' death. Most of Phillips' research was done during the term of right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro, as Brazil's Amazon deforestation reached a 15-year high in 2021.
The pace of destruction slowed after Bolsonaro's 2022 defeat by leftist leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Throughout the finished book's more than 300 pages, fragments of hope mix with grim realities.
In Chapter 2, 'Cattle Chaos,' Phillips notes that 16 per cent of Brazil's Amazon has already been converted to pasture. Even a farmer who has become a model for successfully increasing productivity without clearing most of his land is criticised for his widespread use of fertilisers.
In his chapter on bioeconomy, journalist Jon Lee Anderson visits a reforestation initiative where Benki Piyãko, an Ashaninka leader, promotes environmental restoration coupled with ayahuasca treatment and a fish farm. But the veteran reporter doesn't see how it can be scalable and reproducible given man-made threats and climate change.
Later in the chapter, he quotes Marek Hanusch, a German economist for the World Bank, as saying: 'At the end of the day, deforestation is a macroeconomic choice, and so long as Brazil's growth model is based on agriculture, you're going to see expansion into the Amazon.'
In the foreword, the group of five organizers state that 'Like Dom, none of us was under any illusion that our writing would save the Amazon, but we could certainly follow his lead in asking the people who might know.'
But in this book stained by blood and dim hope, there is another message, according to Watts: 'The most important thing is that this is all about solidarity with our friend and with journalism in general.'