By Cecile Mantovani<\/p>\n
OBERGOMS, Switzerland, July 3 (Reuters) – Snow on Swiss glaciers disappeared weeks earlier than usual this summer under the \u200cglare of a European heatwave, pitching the Alps into another \u200cyear of heavy ice loss, scientists say.<\/p>\n
Researchers say that on June 29, the Rhone Glacier \u200bin southern Switzerland reached so-called “Glacier Loss Day” \u2014 the moment when snow accumulated over winter has melted away and glaciers begin shedding the ice below.<\/p>\n
Matthias Huss, director of Glacier Monitoring Switzerland, said three months still remained this \u200cyear for ice to \u2060melt that has taken decades or even centuries to build up.<\/p>\n
“This is really a worrying situation,” he said.<\/p>\n
HEATWAVES AND \u2060SCANT SNOWFALL BATTER GLACIERS<\/p>\n
This year, two heatwaves that followed low winter snowfall helped accelerate “Glacier Loss Day” to its second-earliest date on record. In 2022, \u200bit occurred \u200bthree days earlier.<\/p>\n
During June’s heatwave, the \u200bmelting water from glaciers across \u200cSwitzerland could have filled an Olympic-sized swimming pool every six seconds for two weeks, Huss said.<\/p>\n
“The glaciers are in a very bad state at this time of the year,” Huss said. “We are almost as critical as in the record-breaking year 2022.”<\/p>\n
Huss said one monitoring site at \u200cthe Rhone Glacier recorded a loss of \u200babout 1.5 metres (5 feet) of ice during \u200btwo weeks of extreme heat.<\/p>\n
VISIBLE \u200bTO THE NAKED EYE<\/p>\n
Tourists visiting the glacier retreats said \u200cchanges were impossible to ignore.<\/p>\n
German tourist \u200bHarry Block, who \u200bhas been visiting the Rhone Glacier for 50 years, became emotional at the sight of them.<\/p>\n
“I can cry,” he said, describing \u200bhow the glacier, once \u200c80 metres high, has shrunk. “Here you see climate change. This \u200bis climate change.”<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Cecile Mantovani in Obergoms; Writing by \u200bMarleen Kaesebier; Editing by Alex Richardson)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Cecile Mantovani OBERGOMS, Switzerland, July 3 (Reuters) – Snow on Swiss glaciers disappeared weeks earlier than usual…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":96646,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[4],"tags":[46386,46027,38453,4308,17],"class_list":["post-96645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-switzerland","tag-european-heatwave","tag-heatwave","tag-matthias-huss","tag-rhone-glacier","tag-switzerland"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ch\/116855766126039141","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=96645"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96645\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/96646"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}