Glaciologist Bernhard Zagel warns some glaciers around Salzburg have already lost half their ice in just 25 years.
Glacier researchers and hydrologists are currently surveying glaciers in Salzburg, Austria, and even if detailed data and measurement results are not yet fully available, it's clear that the glaciers have lost mass and size again this year.
Bernhard Zagel, a glacier researcher at the University of Salzburg, describes this loss of mass as enormous.
“With eight to nine hours of sunshine, the glacier loses its height by around ten centimetres. That’s enormous because ten centimetres of ice is lost per year. To make up for that, it would take ten metres of fresh snow, which would then turn into ice."
Zagel says the heavy snowfall in the Austrian Tauern mountains until spring and early summer did little to protect the glaciers, and he stressed that the amount of melting at altitudes like 3000 meters is at an incredible level.
"Thirty years ago, the ice lake on Sonnblickkees was just being created. Where there is now bare rock, there was ice ten metres thick back then - today the edge of the glacier is 600 meters away. And if you ask about the cause, whether it is the greenhouse effect, then I would actually like to turn that around and say that it is becoming increasingly difficult to prove that it is not the greenhouse effect.”
The Stubacher Sonnblickkees at an altitude of 2,700 metres have lost 45 million cubic meters of ice in the past 25 years, which is half of its mass. The researchers assume that in ten years no glacier will be visible in the area.
"I assume that in ten years you won't be able to see a glacier anymore. We may still see small patches of ice but based on what we know about the geometry of the glacier, we can actually say with great certainty that we will hardly see them in the next 10 to 15 years," Zagel warns.