The Alps are losing their glaciers "rapidly" due to climate change - says French expert

A senior French glaciologist has warned that Alpine glaciers have lost more than half their volume since the late 19th century, highlighting the accelerating impact of climate change on Europe’s highest mountain range.

In an interview as part of Anadolu Agency’s special reports “Top of Europe: The Alps,” Sylvain Coutterand detailed the profound changes affecting the French Alps region. He highlighted a profound transformation in the Alpine landscape.

Recalling his childhood summer visits in the 1970s and 1980s to Les Houches, a village in the Auvergne-Rhone-Alpes region near Chamonix, he said rainfall was frequent, every two days, keeping snow at high altitudes and allowing glaciers to advance.

Today, rising temperatures are much more pronounced in ski resorts like Chamonix, France, and Zermatt, Switzerland.

“Climate change is felt more intensely in the mountains than elsewhere,” Coutterand said.

Temperature records in the Alps date back to the 1880s.

“Since the end of the 19th century, glaciers have lost more than 50 percent of their volume,” he stressed.

Alpine glaciers began to retreat from their maximum extents of the Little Ice Age around the mid-19th century, according to glaciological reconstructions, with brief periods of stagnation or advance recurring in many regions during the 1890s, 1920s, and 1970–1980s.

Glaciers at lower elevations and smaller ones have since completely disappeared.

“Glacier meltdown is happening now”

“Glacier melt is happening now. According to models, iconic glaciers like the Mer de Glace could disappear between 2060 and 2080. We are fully in the era of climate change, with no end in sight,” Coutterand said.

Looking ahead, he predicted severe challenges for hydroelectric power generation and for cooling nuclear power plants due to reduced water flow.

In the Chamonix Valley alone, future water supply problems look huge once the glaciers disappear.

“Within 100 years, few glaciers will remain in the Alps, confined to the highest peaks like Mont Blanc or Monte Rosa,” Coutterand warned.

Coutterand explained that melting glaciers are changing the region’s vegetation, allowing parasites to infect trees and destroy forests, adding that large spruce trees in the field are dying and drying up.

According to the glaciologist, the bark beetles that settle on these trees first devour the bark, then the trunk itself.

He stressed that curbing greenhouse gas emissions could still save the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets. /AA/