Worst melt year on record for Swiss glaciers

Swiss glaciers have recorded their worst melt rate since records began more than a century ago, losing 6% of their remaining volume this year or nearly double the previous record of 2003, monitoring body GLAMOS said on Wednesday,

The melt was so extreme this year that bare rock that had remained buried for millenia re-emerged at one site while bodies and even a plane lost elsewhere in the Alps decades ago were recovered. Other small glaciers all but vanished.

“We knew with climate scenarios that this situation would come, at least somewhere in the future,” Matthias Huss, head of the Swiss Glacier Monitoring Network (GLAMOS) told Reuters. “And realising that the future is already right here, right now, this was maybe the most surprising or shocking experience of this summer.”

More than half of the glaciers in the Alps are in Switzerland where temperatures are rising by around twice the global average.