Earth’s SOS
Stained and weathered like an ancient giant, the Mount Titlis glacier prods the heavens of central Switzerland. Even in this icy, otherworldly realm, surrounded by the Alps of nearby Germany, France and Italy, and 3238 metres above sea level, nature cannot escape the ravages of global warming. Thousands of years old, the glacier is facing its final years thanks to increasingly warmer-than-average summers.
Last year was the second hottest year on Earth since records commenced in 1880. The year before (2016) currently holds the record for the hottest year. However, rather than a few random hot years, it’s an upward trend. “Sixteen of the 17 warmest years in the 136-year record all have occurred since 2001,” the NASA climate website informs us.
Draped across the ice like gigantic bandages, sheets of plastic are an attempt by scientists to stop the Mount Titlis glacier melting. Oblivious of its fate, tourists revel in their glimpse of summer ice. Not everyone here is oblivious, though. Thomas, a local tour guide with a 20-year history of visiting Mount Titlis, recalls that in 1992 the tongue of the glacier descended much lower down the mountain. As the cable car dips back down the valley, he points to barren rock beyond the Trübsee Station and says, “The tongue of the glacier once started here.”
An hour-and-a-half away in Lucerne, the Gletschergarten Museum houses graphic evidence of the retreat of Swiss glaciers. Black-and-white photographs from the 1800s show explorers dwarfed before titanic, bulging gorges of blue ice — what the Rhône, Morteratsch, Aletsch glaciers, and others, looked like then. More recent photographs of the same locations show increasingly lengthy treks through barren, stony chasms to reach much more distant and thinner ice margins.
How long have they got? A widely reported new study by Fribourg University in Switzerland predicts most glaciers in central Switzerland will have disappeared by the end of this century due to global warming. All across Earth, ice mass is reducing and contributing to rising seas.
According to prominent Melbourne-based environmental campaigner, Paul Mahony, “The volume of Arctic sea-ice (ice floating on the ocean) has fallen 72 per cent since 1979.” Satellite imagery from NASA reveals Greenland is losing an average of 303 billion tonnes of ice, and Antarctica an average 118 billion tonnes, each year. Thanks to progressively warmer weather, Greenland’s summer melt season is now 70 days longer than in the early 1970s.
The spectre of rising seas might capture our attention, but a diminished coastline is literally the tip of the iceberg in terms of the consequences of unabated global warming. Potentially destroying some of the most important and beautiful ecosystems of our planet, such as coral reefs, glacial landscapes and inland waterways, as well as significant flora and fauna, global warming could transform life on Earth.
Climate change and global warming are objective, measurable scientific facts, not opinions.
Images of collapsing polar shelves, emaciated polar bears and flooded islands viewed through our TV screens help propagate the notion that climate change is happening elsewhere. But the consequences of climate change are everywhere, affecting industries as widespread as farming, tourism and insurance, and even the weekly shopping bill and how much we need to water our gardens. A common misperception is that climate change lies in some distant, doomsday future.
