With the melting glaciers in Europe, there are signs of climate risk everywhere

Morteratsch, Switzerland – almost 7,000 feet above sea level, the way to Morteratsch Glacier is a little longer every year.

Leo Hösli made the ascent many times. Each step sends stone shards that clatter downhill and debris that are once sealed under glacial ice.

A few months ago, Höli, who was examined by Morteratsch, drilled seven missions in the ice caves at the foot of the glacier. At the beginning of August he could not come close enough to take measurements. The summer melt was so violent that the caves had become too unstable to enter them. He founded a zoom lens and found only a share.

“They have melted out or collapsed under these parts of the ice cave,” said Höli. “It is simply too warm to exist in this state.”

Europe’s glacier shrink faster in every dimension than somewhere else on earth.

A pioneering study published in the Journal Nature, the largest of its kind that used field measurements and satellite data from 35 research teams, showed that glaciers in the Alps and Pyrenees have lost around 40% of their mass since 2000.

Thanks to its accessibility and dramatic withdrawal, Morteratsch is more than 2 miles, driven by humans induced by humans, thanks to its accessibility and dramatic withdrawal. During our hike, Höli pointed to artifacts that showed how far the glacier had withdrawn.

“I think to go here and see the signposts, see where the glacier was a hundred years ago 50 years ago, has more effect than just seeing in one picture,” he said.

But the soundtrack is just as striking as the view: rocks that clatter over the valley walls, the constant roar of melting water.

Glaciers are the most visible climate indicators of the planet, but because they are remote, their loss can feel abstract. In Europe, glaciers support several important industries such as agriculture and tourism. The municipalities are dependent on melting water for drinking and agriculture as well as ice and snow for winter tourism. It feeds rivers that ultimately lead to rising sea levels worldwide.

The withdrawal of the glaciers has also left unstable landscapes, which quickly shift, which leads to destructive landslides, threaten the alpine villages.

At the border in Austria, Andrea Fischer, the vice director of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Mountain Research at the Austrian Academy of Science, becomes more and more common.

“A third of the Austrian glaciers will disappear over the next five years,” said Fischer, standing on what the Stubai glacier, about 72 miles northeast of Morteratsch, was over. At the top of one of the most popular ski areas in Austria, Stubai is expected to disappear exclusively by 2033.

“The end of the alpine glaciers comes really very, very close. And we see it. It is not modeled on the computer. It is a real fact,” added Fischer when she navigated a muddy route on the edge of the ice.

The global temperatures rise again and again because the international efforts to contain greenhouse gas emissions stalls. According to NASA, the hottest was the last year. The US withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement significantly undermines the global climate efforts, which is almost impossible to limit the warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (approx. 3 degrees Fahrenheit).

Europe is the fastest warmed continent in the earth and the temperature of Austria has risen by 3.1 degrees Celsius since 1900, more than twice as high as the global average. According to Fischer, studying glaciers is, Fischer said to understand where the climate leads.

“Glacier are climate archives,” she said. Glacier preserve records of precipitation and atmospheric circulation that stretch back for centuries, data that does not exist anywhere else. “I’m really looking for every cold ice that contains these archive information,” she said before everything is gone.

For decades, Fischer experimented with options for slow glacier loss: snow emping, pumping water into the snow cover, the “wrapping” of ice in reflective white leaves, which she calls “glacier plaster” and refers to bandages. Twenty years ago, she hoped that these leaves could work on a large scale. Today she knows that you can’t.

“There is no way to save glaciers without saving the climate,” she added.

Life in the Alps has always been risky, said Fischer, but today the risks are reinforced by global warming

At the foot of the Stubai valley last month, a massive landslide through the village of Neustift, tore through arable land and damage a bridge. Nobody was injured. But Fischer binds it directly to climate change.

The melting per meal can weaken the peaks. Heavy rainfall trigger slides that have been destabilized by pulling glaciers.

Back in Switzerland, the village of Blatten was wiped out by a glacier slide in May. The villagers were evacuated, but the costly reconstruction will take years.

“The next 20 to 50 years will bring extreme changes for us when we live in the mountains, for all people who live all over the world,” she said. “And we have to think about the consequences.”

And the solutions are in our control, she said.

You and Hösli agree that it is not too late. It is still worth a lot to be saved.

“There are still huge amounts of ice cream here,” said Höli, looking for the top of Morteratsch. “It is not a completely lost thing for me. There is still hope and we can still do something,” said Höli. “It is too early to give up.”

This article was originally published on nbcnews.com