A particularly unfavorable mix of a winter with little snow and a hot summer has hit the Ötztal Hintereisferner glacier badly. According to data from the University of Innsbruck, the glacier has lost more mass this year than ever before. The melting record includes a minus of five percent – which corresponds to almost 20 million cubic meters of water. In addition, the researchers assumed that in ten to 20 years only half of the Hintereisferner will be left.
The glacier in the upper Ötztal has been observed for over 100 years, and there have been continuous records of its mass balance since 1952, the university announced on Friday. Since 2016, it has also been scanned daily with a terrestrial laser scanner. This allows changes to be measured in real time, a system that is unique worldwide, according to the university.
“We saw at the beginning of summer that the glacier was heading towards a negative mass balance due to the lack of snow in the winter,” reported Rainer Prinz from the Institute of Atmospheric and Cryosphere Sciences. “In the winter months, only two meters of snow accumulated on average, usually at least three. In June, July and August, the second highest temperatures ever recorded were also recorded in this area,” he explained the causes of the record melt.
Even if in the future not every summer will be like this year’s, it was clear to Prinz: “These are clear signals of man-made climate change. The consequences of our greenhouse gas emissions are already affecting us fully.” A team at the university is currently working on the further development of the Open Global Glacier Model OGGM, an openly accessible model for simulating glacier development. The glacier researcher predicted that an annual volume loss of five percent would become more and more common.
Source: Nachrichten
