Trient Glacier, the Alps, Switzerland
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September 16, 2008
James Balog
Internationally acclaimed photographer James Balog is the founder and director of the Extreme Ice Survey. A former mountain guide with a graduate degree in geomorphology, James is equally at home on a Himalayan peak or a whitewater river, the African savannah or polar icecaps. James lives on a Rocky Mountain ridge top high above Boulder, Colorado with his wife Suzanne, and daughters Simone and Emily.
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I’ve always thought of the Alps as being glaciated. But the ice there is retreating really quickly because of changing temperature and precipitation patterns. Tongues of ice are in the process of melting, breaking apart, and pulling back upslope. Swiss scientists expect the vast majority of the ice there to have vanished by the end of the century—my God, what a change in reality that will be!
The Trient, which I skied down, through 70 cm of beautiful powder snow, on a winter day in the mid-1990s, is a shrunken relic of its former self. Fifty percent of the total mass of Alpine glaciers has melted away since 1850, with half of that loss occurring since the 1970s. It’s thinned at least 30 meters in the past few decades alone . . . Good-bye, glaciers |
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