Clip about European glaciers starts here
Transcribed:
6.10
There's a really consistent story of ice shrinkage across all of the Himalaya in much the same way as we see ice shrinking in the Andes and in the European Alps and in other glaciarized mountain ranges across the world.
And you must have seen this over the course of just your career, right? Have you noticed it almost in real time?
Yeah, so we have been doing repeat surveys on some particular glaciers. for example, some of the glaciers in Austria and you can go and see you can walk up to the glacier terminus and when you repeat that visit year on year, every year you have to walk an extra hundred meters because the glacier has shrunk it's really really telling you're like well I had lunch here right on the snout of the glacier last year and now the glacier is all the way over there and you're seeing this happen year on year.
The thing that we're seeing in the European Alps is the glaciers are melting so quickly that the terminuses are becoming very chaotic, very riddled with holes, collapsing all over the place, melting from below as well as on top.
We did some seismic surveys on one of these glaciers and it's like Swiss cheese.
It's the ice is so rotted and degraded. It's certainly something that we see very visually and the glacier recession is probably one of the most visual aspects of climate change.
Yeah. Another glacier that's particularly in a glacier that I've visited many times is Mer Glass in Shaman. I visited it for the first time with my parents when I was 3 years old. Mer de Glas.
That's the sea of ice, right? That's the famous sea of ice.
Yeah. Yes.
Yeah and it has a tourist grotto where you can go in and it's like got colored lights and it's very pretty. But as you go when you go there, as you walk down from the restaurant where the glacier used to be, as you walk down, there are years signposts with years on about when the ice was out that year. And you kind of you say, "Okay, well, I was here at this in 1986 when I was three. And the glacier is, you know, it's miles below me now."
And then we visited it several times over the last few years, and each time you have to go down an extra staircase because the glacier has shrunk.
Well, didn't didn't your parents say don't be a glaciologist? There's no there's no life in this, right?
They're going to run out.
It is a concern, but fortunately, there's lots of ice in Antarctica, so I hope we should be I I'll be all right in my career. [laughter]
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Alps glaciers melting so quickly that the terminuses are becoming very chaotic, very riddled with holes, collapsing
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Alec, you're just back from the Swiss Alps, seeing glaciers there with glaciologists. What What was the mood like? What did they have to say?
Yeah, it's not a happy mood as you mentioned, we're on track possibly for a record ice loss year in the European Alps. And just to put that in perspective, they're talking about 6% of all the ice that's left in glaciers in the Alps being lost just this summer alone.
So, I mean, it's just a massive amount and I went to the Ran Glacier with some scientists from ETH Zurich, and that glacier has lost 30 million tons of ice just this summer alone, which is enough to fill 12,000 Olympic swimming pools.
So, I mean, just the amount of melt this summer is staggering. And you can really see it, you know, just as we approached this glacier.
We went by the Belvadier Hotel which was built as a place where people could sit and drink a cocktail and look over the glacier in this valley. Well, the glaciers retreated 2 km. It's no longer visible from that hotel.
It actually makes an appearance in the James Bond film Goldfinger.
James Bond drives by and there's this huge cascade of ice behind him.
Well, that's no longer there.
It's retreated all the way into the valley and the hotel has been abandoned because there's no reason for it to exist anymore.
We got a little bit closer- you Bethan mentioned the ice grotto at meloss.
There's a similar ice grotto at the ran glacier- they have taken to covering up the ice grotto in geotexiles. These reflective white plasticky coverings to reflect more sunlight and try to save the ice.
So that those geotexiles over that ice cave that now there's a giant lake of meltwater between that and the glacier. The ice cave has been left behind by the glacier which has continued to retreat back.
And the ice cave is, you know, there's about a meter of ice left on the ceiling of it. Pretty soon it's just going to be an ice hole.
And then we made it to the glacier itself. We put on our krampons, started climbing up the glacier.
The first thing we saw was this gigantic hole in the middle of the glacier and the scientists were saying, "Yeah, that this hole has collapsed just this year where it's, you know, there's all these crevases around in this giant hole and at the bottom of it is just a channel kind of a river of meltwater and that's melt water that's coming down through the glacier through these Mulans and then coming under the glacier and just just pouring out of it.
Then we go up a little bit further and the scientists were checking the melt stakes, which are these just big kind of aluminum pipes, tubes that they drill into the glacier to measure, you know, how far down the the ice is melting. The the melt stakes were sticking out at weird angles because they're falling out of the glacier because the glacier has melted so fast this year that the scientists, you know, despite having decades of experience drilling these melt stakes, they didn't drill them in deep enough. They said, "Yeah, we were this caught us by surprise, the extreme melt this summer. You know, we didn't expect this much melt. We didn't drill in the melt stakes deep enough."
So it's just, you know, really shocking when you see it with your own eyes. And then meanwhile, we were hearing these thumps from deep within the glacier, probably creasses opening within the ice. As the ice melts, it gets more unstable. it fractures more which tends to which can lead to these glacier collapses.
I mean we're talking about the one in the Himalayas but one happened last year in the Alps where an entire village was destroyed by a glacier collapse which was similarly kind of a many factors played a role. Permafrost thaw led to a rock avalanche rockfall which then led to the fracturing of the glacier which led to the ice avalanche which led to flooding which destroyed the town.
But tragically, one person died in that incident, but not 1,200.
And that really goes to show the importance of early warning systems because the difference was in the in the Swiss Alps, they got an early warning and they evacuated the village before the collapse happened, which unfortunately didn't happen in the Himalayas.
And anyway, the last thing I'll say is that yeah, I mean, just as as we're standing on the glacier throughout the day, you know-
in the morning there wasn't that much water on top of the glacier, but by the afternoon there were just dozens and dozens of these streams of water pouring down the glacier. All this melt water coming off it as the day heated up and all and all sorts of rockfalls coming down the valley sides. you know, every couple of minutes there'd be a couple cracks like gunfire and and you turn and these rocks will be falling down this the sides of the valley as the as the permafrost and more likely with that it's probably ice remnants or these little bits of ice that have been you know cut off from the glacier and as those melt they they drop rocks on the sides of the glacier.
So it was super dynamic, super scary and and just shocking to see it up Close.
13.50
END OF CLIP TRANSCRIPT
From The World The Universe And Us and New Scientist channels on YouTube rom United Kingdom since Feb 13, 2026 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LK9budwbAw
James Bond drives by and there's this huge cascade of ice behind him. Well, that's no longer there. they have taken to covering up the ice grotto in geotextiles. These reflective white plasticky coverings to reflect more sunlight and try to save the ice.
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onday, December 1, 2025
Alps collapsing as glaciers & permafrost melt- ice and rock landslides leave abandoned villages- Earthly 11-min Nov 30 report w transcript, Heating Planet blog
The Alps are beginning to fracture. Entire villages have been abandoned in recent years, as the ground beneath them slid away at terrifying speeds. Chunks of mountain have broken loose, tumbling into valleys and burying homes. Glaciers have collapsed without warning, sending torrents of ice and rock crashing. Scientists warn that the Alps are warming at twice the global average, melting the permafrost “glue” that binds the mountains together. READ & WATCH: The Alps Mountains Are COLLAPSING: Mega Landslides Are Imminent! Earthly Nov 30 report- transcript follows[Earthly channel dives into topics of scientific discoveries, conspiracy theories, and terrifying climate events, from United States since Oct 2022]
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