Flipside: Two miles high and rising.
A shoot from late last summer, this tale of where our amazing glaciers are going is well worth a read.
The view from two miles up is of the world’s steepest rubble field, dropping down to sun- blasted snow and a cracked, grey river of ice cutting between the peaks below. The buzzing of a light aircraft comes in on the wind. I look up, realise my mistake and look down to see light bouncing off the top of its wings as it flies 500m below, following the line of the glacier.
One slip now and i’ll be taking a nosedive off the ridge, dragging our guide with me. if i’m lucky Pete webb, my photographer will be able to stop us by looping his end of the rope that links all three of us around a nearby rock. Otherwise we’ll be base jumping without a chute…
Combin de Corbassier is a 3,700m peak in the chain of mountains called the valais Alps, which straddle the border between Switzerland and italy. Flipside has come here to see what mountaineering is all about and bag an Alpine summit.
It’s 5am and pre-dawn when we first emerge from the Panossiére mountain hut on the northside of the massive Gran Combin glacier. As we peak out of the door into the sub-zero night an open landscape of cloud sits between us and the squared off peak of the 4,300m Gran Combin Mountain, its snow glowing pink with the first rays of dawn that lurk behind the horizon. it looks like we could just roll out of the hut and bounce across the spongy white carpet all the way to our mountain.
Then the wind picks up and the cloud funnels away to reveal the flowing lines of the glacier, cracked across by angry crevasses, like broken skin on a frostbitten hand. The lateral and medial moraine lines betray how the monstrous tongue of ice flows like a slow-motion river, scouring its deep trench between the mountains with a high-pressure, boulder-embedded, icy Brillo pad weighing billions of tonnes. And now we have to cross it.
It took most of yesterday to walk up from the valley to the hut where we rested before this morning’s assault on the higher ground. We have a steep slope of jumbled rock to climb down before we reach the ice. Jagged rock slabs stick out from a chunky gravel of pulverised gravel. it looks like a boulder field that’s been smashed apart with heavy artillery. closer to the ice are massive, rusty-brown, car-sized boulders that have been dropped by the retreating glacier as it melts. According to our guide the level of the glacier has been dropping year after year, which means you have to allow more time to climb down onto it and then climb back off it onto the rock of the mountains.
On the ice the going is easier and the lack of snow on the ice means we can easily spot and leap over the massive crevasses. But the glacier surface soon ratchets upwards and we have to stop to attach steel- toothed crampons to our boots.
‘don’t tread on the brown bits,’ the guide tells me. This is gritty snow covering deep crevasses that drop tens of metres into the glacier’s churning heart. We rope our climbing harnesses together. if one of us goes the others should act as a break and arrest the fall. Of course the second man could also get dragged in too. that’s why we all carry an ice axe in one hand. it’s useful when climbing to push against ice and rock but a life-saver when whacked into the ice to arrest a fall.
We find this out for ourselves a few hours later when I hear the guide lets out a strangled shout and I look up to see him drop through a crust of sun-softened snow as neatly as a posted letter. He jolts to a stop, chest deep in the crevasse that has opened up underneath him like a hungry shark. I start to move towards him but remember what I was told, ‘stay where you are and brace to arrest the fall’. He digs himself out but it’s a reminder of how hostile this place is. Now we’re up onto the steepest part of the glacier and we pick our way up house-sized lumps of blue ice. suddenly a booming cracking sound seems to arrive from everywhere at once. the guide freezes and I realise with horror that it came from the ice below us. He smiles, and says, ‘the glacier is restless today.’
It takes us a few of hours to cross the glacier and now a steep snow slope on the lower part of the mountains looms above us. We kick snow steps into the unstable surface with our crampons and stab the point of our ice-axes into the snow to climb up. Loose your footing here and you’re not going to stop sliding for a very long time.
But the snow soon gives way to rocky scree slope. it’s summer 2011 and the Alps have been steaming in a heatwave all season, meaning rocks that are usually covered in snow are exposed, making the going even harder.
We traverse to our left under a windblown serac of snow that curls above our heads like a wave frozen mid-break to arrive at the base of combin de corbassier. the hot alpine sun is hammering down and I realise with a shock that my camelbak has run dry. Not good. My mouth gets even drier as I look up at the impossibly high ridge that cuts like a dragon’s spine up to the peak. We rope up again to start the climb, but we have to be fast.
As the sun gets higher the snow over the glacier will soften, increasing the risk of dropping through into huge, hidden crevasses that could swallow a car, never mind a man. ‘the longer we take the harder and more dangerous it becomes,’ warns our guide.
We have to pick our line up the rocky ridge in a high- altitude scramble, pulling up the rockface with hands and feet. it’s not technical enough to use climber’s protection, but hard enough to be a sloped version of your local climbing wall.
Every time it seems like the summit is about to appear we see another section of the ridge unfold in front of us, getting steeper each time. After an age of climbing the boulders get bigger and level out. ‘there’s usually snow up here, says the guide, and I realise with a start that we’re a short traverse to the summit.
We crack on and for the first time as I can pear down each face of the mountain I realise just how high we are. The glacier looks a world away and the valley below looks like I’m seeing it from space. It’s taken us nine hours but the view from the top is definitely worth it. Now all we need to do is find a way back down before the glacier becomes a minefield of hidden crevasses…
Where’s all the ice going?
For now, glaciers cover much of the Alps. But these massive, moving ice rivers that form in places where snow falls quicker than it melts are disappearing. Because of global warming. It’s the same elsewhere
In the world. The 1991 discovery of a 5300- year old fossilised man in a melting glacier in Italy shows that many glaciers are smaller now than they’ve been for thousands of years.
‘One hundred squared kilometres of Alpine glacier are melting and water companies are making a fortune. This will happen for the next hundred years or so, until all the water is down. Then the companies will have a problem, says glaciologist Matthias Huss from University of Fribourg.
‘The best case scenario is that there will be less than 20% left by the end of the century. If it gets much warmer, all but the glaciers above 4000m.
Why does it matter?
Rain and snow from Alps provide the Danube, Rhine, Rhone and Po rivers with up to 80 % of their water. Will directly affect around 16 million people in eight countries, from France in the west to Hungary in the east.
Glaciers freeze rainfall during winter and release it during summer, when there’s a shortage. Without glaciers snow melts quicker and runs off sooner, at different times of year.
Rock formations held together by the ice for centuries become unstable and even collapse.
Glacial lakes form but these are unstable and likely to flood.
Some animals are at risk of extinction. Meltwater stonefly lives in the immediate downstream of melting glaciers.
Mountaineers can’t as easily use crampons, ice axes, ladders and ice screws to haul themselves up sheer mountain faces.
Mountain routes blocked, like ‘the American Direct Route’ in France after the west face of Le Petit Dru collapsed.
Gemstock ski resort in Switzerland covered Gurschen glacier with reflective foil blanket to stop it
Alpine glacier melt
3 per cent of Alpine glacial ice is lost every year on average, about 1 metre of ice thickness.
10 percent lost in the record-breaking heat of 2003. Seven percent in 2006.
9.6 metres of ice has been lost since 1980.
26 per cent of ice cover has been lost in the last 40 years. 50% since 1850.
1970 caused media panic and expectation of a new ice-age when Alpine glaciers advanced for a few years.
375 sq km is the area covered by Mont Blanc ice fields in early 1970s. Late 2000s down to 275 sq km
14 metres of ice thickness lost for Hintereisferner (Austria), Gries (Switzerland), and Sarennes (France).
100 km3 is the volume of Alpine ice that has been lost since 1900.
100 km3 is also the volume of Alpine ice right now, enough to cover the UK in 1m of water.
2000 km2 is the area of glaciers in the Alps.
90 per cent is the area of glaciers that will be lost by about 2100
