CLIMATE CHANGE AT THE MONT BLANC GLACIER – THERE IT IS

Want to See Climate Change? Come With Me to the Mont Blanc Glacier; When I visited in 1988 it took just three steps to reach the ice. Today it takes 370.

Helene Fouquet, September 24, 2015 (Bloomberg News)

“…[In the French Alps, the Mer de Glace, or “Sea of Ice” is the most famous part of the Mont Blanc glacier and the most visible symbol in France of climate change. In 1988, when we went there, it took just three stair-steps to get down to the ice and to a huge cave carved inside the glacier but the Mer de Glace has melted and shrunk so fast that visitors now have to go down 370 steep steps to get there]…The blue ice is lost under a thick layer of dust and rubble. It’s a sad sight, and a striking example of the reality of climate change and global warming…Glaciers aren’t static, they are like rivers of ice. They flow, they grow, they shrink…They vary a lot from one year to another. But the Mer de Glace has never shrunk as rapidly as it has in the last 15 years…

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“The Mer de Glace has retreated by two kilometers from its 1850 position, when it was so big that it reached Chamonix, down in the valley. About every year in the past three decades it has lost a net three to five meters at its snout, the word used to describe the lower end of the glacier…The snout may go back another 1.2 kilometers by 2040…and the thickness of the ice there will shrink by dozens of meters. In the worst-case scenario it could even retreat 1.4 kilometers…Global warming has had other visible and irreversible impacts in the Alps and other mountains. As summer temperatures added 1.5 degrees Celsius in the past 30 years, the heat attacked the permafrost, the layer of soil and stones that remains below freezing point throughout the year...Globally, the 10 warmest years in the past 134 all have occurred since 2000, except for 1998, and 2014 was the warmest year on record, according to data from NASA…[S]cientists fear July 2015 was the worst of all summers…” click here for more

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