‘Year of extremes’ for shrinking glaciers in Switzerland in 2018: study

Despite an exceptionally snowfilled winter, Swiss glaciers have lost 2.5 percent of their volume this year, according to a report Tuesday which dubbed 2018 “a year of extremes.”

This year’s record-breaking temperatures have greatly contributed to the loss of “a fifth of [the glaciers’] volume over the past decade,” according to the annual study on the state of the glaciers, published by the Swiss Academies of Science.

And this happened despite the piles and piles of snow that fell during the 2017-18 winter season, following three consecutive years of little snow in the Alpine country. Snow acts like a protective covering that prevents glaciers from melting.

“Up until the end of March, there was still more than twice as much snow as usual above an altitude of 2,000 meters,” the report authors said.

But the exceptional snowfall at the start of the year was matched by soaring temperatures and little to no precipitation after March.

According to the Swiss Office of Meteorology, the period between June and August ranked among the hottest on record after 2003 and 2015.

And the period from April to September was “by far the hottest ever recorded” in Switzerland, the report said.

It pointed to the case of Weissfluhjoch peak (2,540 meters), which hosts the Swiss Institute for Snow and Avalanche research.

The peak saw no snowfall of more than one centimeter between May 17 and September 4 – a first in the 81 years of record-keeping, the report said.

The heat and lack of precipitation “not only melted large quantities of winter snow [up to five meters on some glaciers], but also melted the ice,” said Matthias Huss, in charge of the Glacier Monitoring Network.

The Swiss glaciers have rarely experienced such a melt, with the exception of a massive heatwave in Europe 15 years ago, he said.

Last week, a UN climate report warned drastic action was needed to prevent Earth from hurtling toward an unbearable rise in temperature.