The looming global catastrophe of high altitude glacier collapse with oil & gas industry lies, deception, blandness, indifference to hard facts and 2100, 2100 ..

Why did I take the trouble to transcribe a large part of this article?

SEE PARA 1 ⭆ our ignorance when we all think we’re very responsible mums and dads is frankly psychotic and so are the political leaders who endorse the kind of anodyne empty patter in paragraph 1

Under current climate policies, more than 97% of glaciers in the Alps will be gone by 2100, along with most of those in Scandinavia, Russia, the tropical Andesand western Canada and the US. Only 5 per cent of Rhone glacier will be left.

That would deplete many critical water sources. Rhone glacier, for instance. is the source of the Rhône River. This great waterway flows through Lake Geneva and into France, where 19 major hydro-electric power plants line its course. Its waters cool the reactors at four nuclear plants and carry up to 5 million tonnes of goods on barges each year. The Rhône also irrigates much of France’s fruit production.

Glaciers in the Alps have already passed “peak water”, meaning the melt they contribute to rivers in summer is gradually drying up. Europe will have to consider adaptations like building new reservoirs.

“The situation is really treacherous because with every day of the heatwaves we’re using up the reserves of ice, the stocks that have been built up many decades or centuries ago,” says Matthias Huss at ETH Zurich.

Permafrost, the icy glue that holds the mountain together, is thawing along with the glaciers. This is what increased rockfalls onto the Birch glacier near the Swiss village of Blatten. In May 2025, the glacier fractured, burying the village under 20 million tonnes of rock and ice, and killing a shepherd. Experts monitoring the glacier evacuated 300 inhabitants nine days before the collapse. Glacier fracturing isn’t only a problem in the Alps. As New Scientist went to press, last week’s devastating flash flood in Nepal and Tibet was also thought to have been caused by a glacier collapse.

Last month, researchers showed that laying a fibre-optic cable across a glacier can detect crevasses hidden 25 metres down, a far cheaper way to monitor fracturing than seismometers. They were surprised to find that 8 per cent of the volume of a glacier in Valais, Switzerland, was empty crevasses. Scientists may be underestimating the damge to glaciers’ stability, says Thomas Hudson at ETH Zurich, one of the study’s authors. Monitoring used to be all about protecting the glaciers, he says. “We now need to put more of our focus on monitoring for prevention of disasters.”

I ask Werder if attempts to preserve glaciers with geotextiles or reflective clay granules could work. He says the outcomes of those geoengineering approaches are highly uncertain.

While ski resorts have covered parts of eight other glaciers with geotextiles, spreading them across Switzerland’s large glaciers would cost £1.3b a year and only slow ice loss, not stop it. But if we could limit global warming to 2°C the number of glaciers surviving to 2100 would almost double, including 269 in the Alps.

“All the other solutions are pretty desperate,” says Werder.

“We really should just reduce CO₂ fast.”//

John 🦘🌏