AROUND 95 per cent of glaciers in the Alps will be wiped out by the end of the century if the world continues pumping out carbon emissions at the current rate.
That is the stark warning from research using a more realistic way of modelling how ice will react to rising temperatures due to climate change.
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“You get what you can’t really call glaciers any more, just some ice patches,” says Harry Zekollari at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, who presented the work at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) conference in Vienna, Austria, this week.
Today, there are about 3500 glaciers in the Alps, containing around 100 cubic kilometres of water. Some of those glaciers lie below the snow that thousands of people ski and snowboard across each year.
The extent to which this ice will be lost hinges on how much carbon dioxide humanity emits in the coming years. Governments’ carbon-cutting plans under the Paris climate deal currently have the world on course to restrict the temperature rise to about 3°C by 2100, which would cause a 94.5 per cent decline in the mass of glaciers in the Alps.
But if tougher action limits the temperature rise to no more than 1.7°C, about 37 per cent of the ice will remain by 2100.
“I think there is still hope. We see the emissions decide if there are some glaciers or not,” says Zekollari.
But whatever action countries take on climate change, the Alps are already doomed to lose about half of their glacial ice by 2050.
This is partly because glaciers respond slowly to temperature changes, so some melting is already locked in by historical emissions. The other reason is that the different paths the world might take on emissions, as outlined by the UN climate science panel, stay relatively close to one another in the next two decades, but take very different trajectories later in the century.
“The Alps are already doomed to lose about half of their glacial ice by 2050”
Details of a €13 million European project to drill several kilometres into Antarctic ice were also announced at the EGU conference this week.
Researchers on the “Beyond EPICA” project, which hopes to find ice dating back 1.5 million years, will use the bubbles of CO2 and other gases trapped deep inside ice cores to provide a window into Earth’s past climate.
So far, the oldest ice ever to have been drilled was a core that dates back 800,000 years, unearthed 15 years ago. That leaves a gap in our knowledge of a key period when Earth’s climate shifted, known as the mid-Pleistocene transition.
In this period, the world changed from a rhythm of switching between warm and cold phases every 40,000 years, to a cycle every 100,000 years.
There are competing explanations for why this happened, and the drilling project hopes to provide the evidence to explain it.
“We need to understand why we have this change 900,000 years ago, and why we live in a 100,000-year [cycle] world. Without [doing] that, we cannot say we really understand our current climate systems,” says Barbara Stenni of Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy.
The ice will also provide crucial data to improve modelling of how our planet’s climate will evolve in the future, she adds.
